When your conditions fire, does the market actually move?
A strategy can fail for two completely different reasons: the entries move no differently from any other moment, or they do move and the exits give it back. A backtest tells you the strategy lost money. It does not tell you which of those happened.
Measure one thing at a time
An entry check takes your conditions, finds every historical moment they fired, and measures what price did over the following bars. No stop, no target, no exit rule — because the question is whether the entry is worth anything at all, and every exit you add is another variable standing between you and that answer.
Get this answer first. Designing exits around an entry that moves no differently from a random moment is weeks of work on a foundation that was never there.
How it runs
- Pick a strategy and a window. How many bars after each firing you want measured.
- Every historical firing is found. The same transition rule the live scan uses, so the moments measured are the ones you would have been alerted to.
- The move after each one is recorded, bar by bar, in the direction the strategy trades — mirrored for a short, so a setup that trades a fall reads as a positive number.
- You get the distribution, plus the count of firings, which is what decides whether any of the rest means anything.
The chart it produces
A path, not a bar per horizon. The shape is the answer: an entry that pops immediately and fades is a different strategy from one that grinds upward for two days, and the holding period worth choosing is wherever the line stops climbing.
The baseline is the part that matters. It is the same measurement taken from arbitrary moments in the same window — what the instrument did anyway, conditions or no conditions. In a market that spent the period drifting upward, every entry produces a rising line, and a chart without a baseline would make all of them look meaningful. Only the gap between the two lines belongs to your strategy. Here that gap is about 0.73% over twenty bars; the entries line's own 0.90% is not the number to read.
The shaded band is the interquartile spread of individual trades — a quarter did worse than its lower edge, a quarter better than its upper. It widens with time because dispersion does, and it is the band an exit has to live inside.
Illustrative figures, to show what the chart reports and how to read it.
A finished check
- Strategy
- Mean Reversion · LONG
- Times fired
- 318
- Measured over
- up to 20 bars
- Moved in favour
- 61%
A result like this says the entries moved differently from ordinary moments — something worth measuring further. A result at 50% says the conditions are picking moments no different from any other moment — and no exit strategy will rescue that.
It tells you what it assumed
If a strategy was edited after a check ran, the result says so — the conditions measured are not the ones it uses now. If optional conditions were measured as required, it says that too, because that fires less often than the strategy does live. Both of those look exactly like an ordinary result otherwise, and both would make the product look wrong when it was simply answering a stricter question.
What this does not do
It is not a backtest and it does not report profit. There are no exits in it, so there is no trade to have a return — only movement after your conditions fired. It also cannot tell you a strategy is good: a strong entry with badly chosen exits still loses money, which is exactly why the backtest exists as a separate step.
Questions
What does an entry check measure?
What the market did in the bars after your conditions fired, and nothing else. No stop, no target, no exit rule — just the movement that followed, measured over a window you choose. It answers whether your entries moved any differently from a random moment before you spend time designing exits around them.
How is it different from a backtest?
A backtest measures a complete strategy: entries, exits, costs, and the trades that result. An entry check measures only the entry. Separating them matters because a strategy can fail for two very different reasons — the entries move no differently from any other moment, or they do move and the exits give it back — and a backtest alone cannot tell you which.
Does it work for short strategies?
Yes. The measurement is mirrored for a short, so a strategy that trades a fall reads as a positive move. A short setup that works does not appear as a negative number.
How many firings do I need for the result to mean anything?
More than you think. A handful of firings tells you almost nothing, which is why the number of times your conditions fired is shown first on every result — it is what decides whether the rest of the card is worth reading at all.