edge or luck

Is your strategy real, or just lucky?

We check your trades against 1,000 coin-flip versions of them. You get a plain verdict, the why, and what to do next.

What do you have?
Drop your trade file here or choose a file A CSV or Excel export from TradingView, your exchange or a spreadsheet. Several files are judged as several strategies.
Judging your trades

How it judges

Luck can make almost any short record look good. So we ask one question: how often would pure luck do as well with your own trades?

  1. We flip a coin for each of your trades.

    Same trades, same sizes, same order. Only whether each one wins or loses is left to chance.

  2. We do it a thousand times.

    That draws everything luck alone could have done with your trades. Then we see where your real line lands.

  3. We say “real” only when luck almost never does as well.

    And we raise the bar for every other version you tried, because trying many makes one look good by chance.

How we know (the maths)

The range shown for your average trade is an anytime-valid confidence sequence (Waudby-Smith and Ramdas). From 30 trades on, it stays honest even if you check after every trade, so watching it does not fool you. Below 30 trades we show no range: a spread measured on a handful of trades is too unsteady to promise anything.

The strength of the evidence is an e-value. When you upload several strategies, or tell us how many versions you tried, we control false discoveries with the e-BH procedure (Wang and Ramdas) at 5%. Versions you didn't show count as zero evidence.

Two corrections guard the cases that fool simple tests. When trades move together, the spread is widened. When losses are rarer but bigger than wins, the bar for “real” is raised (Hall's Edgeworth correction), and nothing is called real before five losing trades.

The coin-flip picture keeps your exact trades and randomises only their signs. It shows what luck does with your trade sizes, which is what matters.

How often it's wrong

A referee should show its own mistakes. These numbers come from the test suite in the repository, and you can run it yourself.

  • The measured error rates appear here once the test suite has run on this version.

What it can't tell you

An honest answer includes its limits.

Also works inside your AI assistant

If an AI writes your bot, it can run the same judge on your backtest and give you the same honest answer, with the reasons. Add it once.