Results screens encourage the wrong questions

QQuietVol· Jul 2026 ago· 👍 2· 💬 5

What's shown most prominently is total return. What determines whether a strategy is real is closer to trade count, distribution shape, and how concentrated the profit is. I'm not claiming the totals shouldn't be there. I'm saying prominence is an editorial choice, and right now the layout invites "did it make money" before "is this a large enough sample to mean anything." The layout could nudge the other way at no cost. That's a rare kind of improvement.

QuietVol

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BacktestBetty· Jul 2026 ago

"Prominence is an editorial choice" — yes. What's at the top of the screen is what people optimize toward.

DataDrivenDee· Jul 2026 ago

This is my feature request stated better than I stated it.

TraderWeTraderWe Team· Jul 2026 ago

Passing this to the team. No promises on timing, but I'll say the honest version: total return is at the top partly because it's the easiest number to compute and display, not because we decided it's the most informative. Trade count is already in the results payload, so surfacing it higher is a layout change, not a data problem. If people have a specific ordering they'd want, put it here — it's more useful to us than a general "show more stats".

LurkerLee· Jul 2026 ago

What number would you actually want first? Trade count or something like worst-trade-removed return?

DrawdownDave· Jul 2026 ago

I once had a backtest that looked incredible and it turned out something like four trades carried the whole thing. I never scrolled down far enough to notice because the big green number at the top had already convinced me. Took me real money to find out what I could have found out by reading the rest of the screen.

Results screens encourage the wrong questions

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