Monthly Trading Summary

The Annual, Monthly, Weekly, and Daily tabs expand on the analysis provided in the Performance Summary section shown in the Summary tab. The Performance Summary evaluates the strategy's performance over the entire test period. The next step is to examine the strategy over various time periods to ensure consistent performance. The available time periods are annual, monthly, weekly, and daily.

A Mark-to-market is performed at the end of each month, resulting in a complete and thorough performance evaluation. This attention to detail will cause certain evaluation tools to reflect number that differ from the Performance Summary. The Rolling Period analysis of the same time periods show the progression between the periods.

The fields that will differ are listed below:

Total Net Profit

This field calculates the total number of dollars made or lost by the trading strategy during the test period.

Notes If you are trading an investment instrument on leverage, Return on Account is a more important field.

When viewing the TradeStation Strategy Performance Report, this field calculates and displays a value for all trades (long and short), long trades (buying long and exiting), and short trades (selling short and exiting).

% Gain

The percentage by which your initial capital investment gained in value for the period tested.

Profit Factor

The gross profit divided the gross loss, which represents how much money was made for every dollar lost.

# Trades

The number of trades signaled in the designated period.

Percent profitable

This field calculates the percentage of profitable trades generated by a strategy. Percent profitable is calculated by dividing the number of winning trades by total trades generated by a strategy.

Percent profitable can be misleading by itself because there are different approaches to profitability. A strategy could have many small winning trades, in which case the percent profitable would be high with a small average winning trade, or a few big winning trades, which would produce a low percent profitable and a big average winning trades.

Many successful strategies have a percent profitability below 50% but are still profitable because their losses are limited.

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