Methodology & honest limits
How the numbers are computed — and what we don't claim
The line between a real analytics tool and a get-rich-quick tout is transparency. Here is exactly how TradePulse produces every figure it shows you, the conventions behind each metric, and the things we deliberately do not pretend to do.
Backtest and paper results are hypothetical, benefit from hindsight, and do not reflect real trading. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Not investment advice.
Event-driven backtest engine
- Bars are replayed one at a time — the engine can only act on information available up to that bar, so it is structurally look-ahead-free.
- Orders fill at the next bar's open, never the signal bar's close. No same-bar hindsight.
- Every run is reproducible: it records a spec hash, an engine version, and a data fingerprint.
Costs are modeled by default
- Commission of 2 bps per side and 1 bps of adverse slippage are applied to every fill.
- Reported returns are therefore net of costs — the total commission paid is shown alongside every result.
- A zero-cost mode exists only for internal tests and is loudly flagged; it is never the default.
Risk controls are enforced, not decorative
- Position caps, a max-daily-loss halt, and consecutive-loss limits run inside the engine.
- Each risk event is recorded on the result — you can see exactly when a control fired.
- Real-money trading stays gated behind these hard controls by design.
How performance is reported
- Drawdown is always shown next to returns — an equity curve on its own hides risk.
- Sharpe and Sortino are annualized with a risk-free rate of 0. That is stated wherever they appear so the numbers are auditable.
- Every trade is exportable to CSV. Backtest numbers carry a persistent 'hypothetical performance' notice.
- The one performance figure on our marketing pages — a single un-optimized reference SMA-crossover strategy — is produced by this exact engine over delayed historical bars, shown per run (never compounded), net of costs, and under the same hypothetical notice. It is an illustration of the method, not a claimed return.
Market data & provenance
- Prices are polled on a ~30-second cadence and can be delayed — they are labeled DELAYED with a last-updated time, never presented as a live tick.
- There is no claim of a real-time consolidated (SIP) feed.
Paper trading
- Paper sessions run the exact same engine as a backtest against incoming bars.
- Fills are simulated on those bars — there is no real-market liquidity, latency, or partial fills. This is disclosed on the paper screen.
The AI copilot is grounded
- It generates a validated strategy spec from plain English — and never auto-executes it.
- Explanations are instructed to use only the numbers actually present in a result, and to refuse rather than invent.
- Every AI response ends with a not-investment-advice note.
What we deliberately don't claim
Honesty is structural here — if something can't be genuinely real on this stack, we don't fake it in the UI. These are on the roadmap, not in the product today:
- A real-time, full-market consolidated (SIP) data feed — data is delayed/polled.
- Survivorship-bias-free or point-in-time fundamentals.
- An automatic in-sample / out-of-sample (train/test) split on backtests.
- Deflated-Sharpe or multiple-testing correction for strategy search.
- A buy-and-hold benchmark overlay on the reference/track-record numbers — the delayed price series is exposed on the public ticker pages, but the side-by-side benchmark comparison is still on the roadmap.