Read Your Backtick Results
A finished Backtick produces a full statistical workup. This guide walks the results page top to bottom so you know which numbers matter, what they are telling you, and what to do next.
Opening a results page
From the Backtick Dashboard, open any run under Recent Backticks, or find older runs in the Backtick Library. Results open with the summary numbers up top, charts and analysis in the middle, and per-position detail below.
Getting around the page
The page is long, so it keeps the essentials within reach as you scroll. On desktop, once the summary card scrolls out of view a compact sticky bar appears at the top of the window carrying the run's name, the full action toolbar, and the four headline numbers: Total Profit, Total Return, CAGR, and Max Drawdown. Its close button dismisses it for the rest of that visit; scrolling back to the top always brings you to the full summary card. On mobile, a floating round button in the bottom-right corner opens the results menu instead, with jump links to every section of the page, and on phones the action buttons join the bottom of that same menu.
Reading your first results page
The page carries a lot of numbers, but a first read only needs to answer five questions, in order:
- Did it earn? The summary strip leads with Total Profit and Total Return, the dollars made and the percentage of the starting balance they represent, with CAGR smoothing that into a yearly growth rate.
- What did it cost to hold? Max Drawdown is the deepest peak-to-trough decline along the way. Ask whether you would genuinely have kept trading through that stretch, because the strategy only earns its Total Profit if you do.
- Is the path livable? Scan the equity curve and the monthly calendar. A smooth climb and steady months are much easier to trade than the same profit delivered in two spikes and a year of flat.
- Is the sample believable? Check how many trades the test made and glance at the Best Trading Days and Worst Trading Days tables. If a handful of outlier days carries the result, treat the totals with suspicion. The Statistical Diagnostics section quantifies exactly this.
- What next? Iterate the settings and rerun, weigh it against another candidate in Compare Backticks Side by Side, or promote it with Turn a Winning Backtick into a Live Bot.
The summary strip and Performance Metrics grid
The top of the page answers questions one and two at a glance:
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Total Profit | Net profit across the whole test period, after commissions from your commission profile. |
| Total Return | That profit as a percentage of the balance the test started from. |
| CAGR | Compound annual growth rate: the smoothed yearly return the strategy achieved. |
| Max Drawdown | The deepest peak-to-trough decline. This is the pain you would have had to sit through. |
The Performance Metrics grid below it adds the risk-adjusted view:
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Sharpe | Return per unit of volatility. Higher means steadier profits for the risk taken. |
| Sortino | Like Sharpe, but only downside swings count against the score. |
| MAR | CAGR divided by the worst drawdown percentage: growth earned per unit of worst-case pain. |
| Ulcer | A drawdown depth-and-duration index. Deeper, longer underwater stretches push it higher. |
| Max DD Days | How long the worst drawdown lasted, which is often harder to sit through than its depth. |
| Win Rate | The percentage of trades that closed profitable. |
| Avg $/Qty | Average profit per single contract of quantity, which makes runs of different size comparable. |
| PCR | Premium capture ratio: how much of the collected premium the strategy actually kept. |
| Contracts and Fees | Total contracts traded and the commissions your profile charged for them. |
There is no universal "good" value for these numbers. They earn their meaning in comparison: against your other candidates, against the same strategy with different settings, and against the drawdown you can honestly tolerate. Win Rate in particular says nothing alone. The Statistical Diagnostics section pairs it with Profit Factor, gross wins divided by gross losses, and each label there opens a plain-language explanation of how to read it.
The monthly calendar and charts
The monthly calendar grid lays out profit and loss month by month across each year of the test, with yearly totals. It is the quickest way to spot seasonality, long flat stretches, and the months that made or broke the strategy. Green months earned and red months lost, with deeper shading for bigger moves, and the buttons above the grid switch the display between percent returns, CAGR, dollar returns, and premium capture.
The profit-over-time chart shows the equity curve; a smooth upward line is easier to trade psychologically than one that goes nowhere for a year and then spikes. The drawdown analysis below it, including the Top 5 Worst Drawdowns table, shows how deep and how long the losing stretches ran.
These are the fast checks. The page goes much further: entry-day and entry-time breakdowns, market and volatility context, statistical confidence intervals, and fill-quality analysis, all covered in Backtick Results: Deep-Dive Analytics.
Per-position detail
Below the summary, each position in the Backtick gets its own row in the Position Performance Statistics table, with per-position win rate, average and maximum win and loss, average entry and exit prices, total premium, drawdown, and more, so a multi-position test shows you which pieces pulled the weight. This is where the next actions live too: Create Bot from Position converts a single winner into a live bot, and Create Bots from Backtick converts several at once. See Turn a Winning Backtick into a Live Bot.
Focus on a single position
Each position row also carries a Results action that opens that position focused: a full results page of its own, scoped to just that position. The summary numbers, charts, and advanced analytics all recompute for the focused position alone, so you can judge one leg of a multi-position test on its own merits. The toolbar is scoped the same way while you are focused: Copy copies just that position, and Sync Bot syncs just that position's bot. The focused page names its source Backtick at the top, and the Return to All Backtick Position Results link brings you back to the combined view. What the scoped Copy and Sync Bot actions do is covered in Copy, Rerun, and Import Backticks and Turn a Winning Backtick into a Live Bot.
Keeping the good ones
Use the star to mark a Backtick saved so it stays organized in your Backtick Library. To weigh one configuration against another, open Compare Backticks Side by Side, and to sanity-check a live bot against its test, use Compare Live Bot Trades to a Backtick.