The two headline numbers
Your simulated P&L is what the configuration you submitted would have made, net of modelled fees, under the fidelity assumptions. The leader’s P&L beside it is that same wallet measured over the same tape and the same settlement rules, so the two are comparable by construction. It is not the wallet’s lifetime P&L and not a figure published anywhere else. Comparing them is the point: it tells you how much of the leader’s result your filters kept, and how much your execution cost gave back. Two more worth finding:- Missed amount — orders that passed every filter and were not placed only because the simulated cash was not there. This is the “you were undercapitalised by this much” number, and it counts the modelled fee as well as the notional.
- Intercepted — fills your filters rejected. It deliberately excludes ran out of cash and sold something the simulation never held, which are consequences of the simulation’s own state rather than of anything you configured.
The reliability banner
A banner appears above the result whenever anything about it needs qualifying. It carries the engine’s own reasons, generated with the percentages that tripped them. The verdict itself is one of two values, ok or low. Any one of the following four conditions makes it low:The banner is absent only when all four of these hold: the verdict is ok, the
tape was not truncated, fee confidence is high, and there were no data gaps at
all. That is a clean run — not a guarantee that the strategy works.
Boundary exposure
The share of the leader’s selling that had no buy inside your window behind it. If a leader opened a position in March and closed it inside a window that starts in June, the simulation never bought what they were closing. Those sells are orphans: their cost basis lies before your window, so the P&L on them belongs to a period you did not simulate. The banner states it as a percentage and in dollars — how much orphan sell notional, out of how much total selling. A high figure usually means the window is too short for how long this wallet holds. Widening it (up to the 180-day ceiling) is the fix.Structural share
The share of this wallet’s activity that was splits, merges, NegRisk conversions and redemptions rather than trades. None of it is a copyable order, so none of it is simulated. A wallet whose edge lives there cannot be copied at all — the backtest is not underrating it, it is telling you the strategy has no copyable form. The denominator is total activity, structural plus traded, so the figure reads directly as “this fraction of what the wallet did is unmodellable”.Fee confidence
Either high or low, and it is a separate judgement from reliability. Low means the fee number is not what a real account would have paid, for one of two reasons: the window overlaps a period whose fee schedule cannot be verified, or the run hit a fill it could not resolve a schedule for and charged zero on it. Either way the modelled fee total is less certain than usual, and the banner says how much money that is. There are deliberately only two values. A stepped scale would need to weight unpriced markets by their notional, which the records do not carry, and “we did not know the fees on 3 markets” is not honestly gradable against “on 30”.Truncation
The tape was cut short. The fetch budget ran out before the whole window could be read, so the run covers a shorter history than its label suggests. Truncation is disclosed in the banner but is not a reliability downgrade on its own: what was simulated was simulated correctly, over less time than you asked for.Data gaps
Everything the engine had to guess at, counted by kind:
Gaps never abort a run. They make the number less trustworthy, and the count is on
screen for that reason.
Non-deployable settings
If the run used any simulation-only control — starting capital, the category allowlist, required or excluded keywords — the result names them. They have no copy-trade equivalent, so a deployed version of this configuration will not have them, and its behaviour will differ accordingly.Sanity checks worth making
Does the P&L survive a realistic execution cost?
Does the P&L survive a realistic execution cost?
Slippage in the simulator is a cost charged on every fill. Re-run at a higher
figure and see how quickly the result decays — a strategy that only works at 0%
is a strategy that only works on paper.
Is the leader actually copyable?
Is the leader actually copyable?
Check the taker share on their profile. A great
backtest on a passive wallet is still a wallet whose edge is in resting orders
you cannot place. See Choosing a trader.
Did the result come from a handful of markets?
Did the result come from a handful of markets?
The per-market table is sorted by simulated P&L. If one market is the whole
result, you are looking at one bet, not a strategy.
Would the same settings behave the same live?
Would the same settings behave the same live?
Not quite: the simulator decides per fill and the live engine decides per swept
order. Your size and value bands need re-reading against sweep size before you
deploy — see Backtest fidelity.
What to read next
Backtest fidelity
The standing list every result ships with.
Backtesting
Configuring and queueing a run.
Copy trading
Deploying a configuration you trust.
The backtester
Where results live in the terminal.
