Performance Dashboard

Understanding Your Trading Metrics

Every number on this dashboard is calculated from the trades you have closed in Stockade's paper trading simulator and stored locally in your browser. Knowing what each figure actually measures is the difference between reviewing your trading and admiring the P&L — analyzing your trading performance walks through win rate, profit factor, and drawdown in more depth.

Headline statistics

Total P&L

The sum of realised profit and loss across every closed trade. Open positions are not counted until you close them, so a flattering total can hide a losing position still on the books.

Equity

Your current account value — the $100,000 starting balance plus total P&L.

Win rate

The share of closed trades that finished in profit. A high win rate is reassuring but means little on its own: a strategy that wins 80% of the time still loses money if the 20% of losers are large enough.

Profit factor

Gross profit divided by gross loss. Anything above 1.0× means you took out more than you gave back, and 1.5× or better is generally considered solid. It answers the question win rate cannot — how much you earn per unit of loss absorbed.

Average win

The mean profit on your winning trades. Read it against your average loss: if your average win is the smaller of the two, you need a correspondingly high win rate simply to break even.

Maximum drawdown

The largest peak-to-trough fall in your equity, expressed as a percentage. This is the pain metric. It estimates the worst stretch you would have had to sit through — in real trading, usually what ends a strategy long before the maths does. Position sizing and the 1% rule covers the recovery math behind why drawdown matters so much.

Equity curve

The equity curve plots your account value after each closed trade. Its shape matters more than its endpoint: a steady climb points to a process you can repeat, while a flat line broken by one or two enormous jumps usually points to luck.

Trade journal

The journal lists every closed trade with its symbol, direction, entry and exit price, size, P&L and holding time. The average duration figure is a useful reality check: many traders discover they are holding losers far longer than winners, or trading a much shorter timeframe than they intended.

Time heatmap

The heatmap breaks your results down by day of the week and hour of the day, colouring each cell by net P&L. Given enough trades it can show that one particular session is quietly responsible for most of your losses. Treat a thin sample with suspicion — a single cell needs dozens of trades behind it before the colour means anything.