A backtest tells you what a set of rules would have done. This shows you how that answer lines up with what your bot actually did, trade by trade and day by day — and explains every difference.
How to open it
Two ways, both starting from a strategy you trade live:
- From the Backtest page — on the Presets tab, pick your strategy under Load From Strategy and click Apply. A switch appears: Compare with this strategy's live trades. Turn it on and click Run Backtest. Turning it on also sets the backtest period to the days that strategy actually traded.
- From the Strategies page — open the ⋮ menu on a strategy card and choose Backtest vs Live. That loads the strategy, sets the dates and runs the comparison for you.
If a strategy has no completed trades yet, there's nothing to compare, and the switch says so. Manual strategies and futures strategies can't be replayed at all.
Note
Trading on both a paper and a live account? A Live / Paper switch appears in the results and starts on whichever one has more trades.
What you get
- A scorecard — your live trades beside the backtest: number of trades, wins and losses, win rate and profit. Both sides are shown before broker fees so they compare like with like.
- One line that matters most — for example, "The backtest took 5 of your 6 live trades, and agreed on the win or loss 4 of those 5 times."
- A profit chart — your live running total against the backtest's, day by day.
- A day-by-day list — click any day to open it. Trades both sides took appear side by side, with each one's entry, exit and result. Trades only one side took are listed with the reason.
Reading the differences
Every unmatched trade gets a plain reason. The common ones:
- "Your bot had already reached your daily profit target and stopped for the day." The backtest priced that day's earlier trade a little differently, stayed under the target, and kept trading. This is the single most common reason a day looks different — see Killswitch.
- "This alert went to your bot but was never saved to the alert history." Your bot traded it; the backtest has no record of it to replay, so it could never take that trade.
- "In the backtest, you had already hit your trades-per-day limit." Same rule, different order of trades.
- "With a limit entry, the backtest never got filled at your price." See Limit vs Market Entry.
- "Your bot didn't take this one." The backtest took a trade your bot skipped. If you expected your bot to take it, check that the strategy was switched on at that moment.
Example
Your daily profit target is $150. Live, your first trade on Thursday made $171, so your bot stopped for the day. In the backtest, that same trade came out at $133 — under the target — so it kept going and took two more trades. One trade a few cents apart changed the whole day. That's why the day shows 1 live trade and 3 backtest trades, with both extra trades marked "your bot had already reached your daily profit target."
Why they'll never match perfectly
- Your bot trades a live market; the backtest replays saved prices. Prices are saved about once a second, so a quick spike your bot filled on may not be in the history.
- Tiers have edges. With Multi-Tier Trailing, a trade that peaks within a penny of the next tier can land on either side of it — one exit gives back a little, the other a lot.
- Today isn't there yet. Today's alerts join the history overnight, so the comparison stops before today.
Use it to answer "do my settings behave the way I think they do?" rather than to expect two identical numbers.
Tip
If a whole day looks wrong, open that day first and check whether its first trade landed near your daily target. That explains more mismatched days than everything else combined.