CANDLE EFFECT
TRADING SYSTEMS
School / Strategy Lab
Strategy Lab

Info Panel

The info panel is the readout that sits in the corner of your chart while the tester runs. It shows two things: what the open deal is doing at this moment, and what every deal before it has added up to.

It updates as the test runs, so you can watch a strategy work through history as well as read the totals at the end. This page goes through it row by row.

Reading it

The panel is built in two halves, with an optional third. The top half covers the deal that is open at this moment. The bottom half covers every deal the test has finished. The third section breaks down how deep those deals went.

Four switches in the Visuals group control all of it, and they are explained on the Settings page.

The panels shown on this page are drawn examples with made up figures, all with Advanced Table switched on.

Info TableThe whole panel. Off means nothing appears on the chart at all. Current TradeThe top half, covering the open deal. Strategy StatsThe bottom half, covering the completed ones. Advanced TableThe figures in brackets throughout, plus the safety order distribution section.

Current trade

Nine rows describing the deal that is running right now. When nothing is open, every value reads as a dash.

CURRENT TRADE
PositionLONG (0.0412)
Avg Entry61,842.10 (−1.24%)
SOs Filled (2/5)████░░░░░░
TP Level62,769.70 (+0.82%)
SL Level58,750.00 (−4.91%)
Next SO60,916.40 (−1.52%)
Unrealized P&L−1.24% (−$52.10)
Est. Deployed$250.00 (54.5%)
Trade Duration (Mar 03 2025)2d 4h
PositionLONG, SHORT or FLAT
Which way the open deal is, or FLAT when there is not one. Advanced Table puts the size held beside it.
Avg Entry
The average price of everything filled so far. It moves every time a safety order goes in, and it is the price the target is measured from, so it is the single most important number in this half of the panel. Advanced adds how far price is sitting from it right now.
SOs Filled
How many safety orders have gone in, out of the maximum allowed, drawn as a bar. It runs green while there is room left, turns orange past halfway, and goes red once the last one has filled and the deal has nothing left to support it with.
TP Level
The price the deal closes at in profit, with the distance price still has to travel to reach it.
SL Level
The stop, when Stop Loss is switched on. A dash when it is off.
Next SO
The price the next safety order fires at, or Max reached once they have all been used. This is the quickest way to see how much room a deal has left before it runs out of support.
Unrealized P&L
What the open deal is worth at this moment as a percentage, with the money figure beside it in Advanced. It reads negative for most of a deal's life, which is exactly how this kind of strategy is supposed to behave.
Est. Deployed
How much money is in the deal right now, and what share that is of the most it could ever ask for. Watching this climb is the quickest way to feel how much a deep deal actually costs.
Trade Duration
How long the deal has been open. Advanced puts the date it opened into the label.

Strategy overview

Ten rows covering every deal the test has completed. This is the half you read once a backtest has finished.

STRATEGY OVERVIEW
Total Trades184
Net Profit (Deployed)$1,240.55 (163.2% of 760 $)
Net Profit (Full Allocation)$1,240.55 (68.9% of 1,800 $)
Max Trade Duration (Jun 11 2025)9d 6h
Avg Trade Duration14h 22m
Max Capital / Deal$760.00
Max Covered Dev11.40%
Max Dev (Avg Entry)6.82%
Max Dev (Base Order)13.95%
Avg SOs / Deal (241 total)1.31
Total Trades
How many deals the test finished. One deal covers the whole cycle, from base order through to close, however many orders went into it.
Net Profit (Deployed)
Profit measured against the deepest capital any single deal actually used. This is your return on the money that went to work, so it is the clearest read on how the strategy itself performed.
Net Profit (Full Allocation)
The same profit measured against the base order plus every safety order, whether they filled or not. That is the money you have to keep sitting there to run the strategy at all, which makes it the harder number of the two. If they are far apart, the test never needed the orders you were reserving for.
Max Trade Duration
The longest a single deal stayed open. Advanced shows the date it finally closed, which is usually worth a look on the chart.
Avg Trade Duration
The average across every completed deal.
Max Capital / Deal
The most money any one deal had in at the same time.
Max Covered Dev
How far price travelled between the base order and the last safety order that filled. In other words, the distance your orders actually managed to cover.
Max Dev (Avg Entry)
The worst distance price ever got from the average entry.
Max Dev (Base Order)
The worst distance from the price the deal opened at. Normally the bigger of the two, and the one to compare against your stop loss, because it tells you whether a stop would have cut a deal that later recovered.
Avg SOs / Deal
How many safety orders a typical deal needed. Advanced adds the total fired across the whole test.

Safety order distribution

The third section, which only appears with Advanced Table on. One row per level, showing what share of deals got that deep.

SO DISTRIBUTION
BO only█████░░░░░ 47.3% (87)
SO 1███░░░░░░░ 28.8% (53)
SO 2██░░░░░░░░ 15.2% (28)
SO 3█░░░░░░░░░ 6.5% (12)
SO 4░░░░░░░░░░ 1.6% (3)
SO 5 (max)░░░░░░░░░░ 0.5% (1)
BO only
The share of deals that closed without needing a single safety order.
SO 1 to SO n
The share that reached each level. The bottom row carries (max) and is the one to watch, since those are the deals that used everything they had.

If it gets in the way

The panel is tall once everything is switched on, and on a small screen it can cover the price action it is describing. Since each half has its own switch, the usual fix is to turn off whichever one you are not reading and leave the other in place.

The same group controls the lines and markers drawn on the chart itself, and those are covered on the Settings page.

The two profit numbers

The panel gives you two, because there are two useful ways to measure a return and they can sit a long way apart. Deployed divides by what the deals actually used, and tells you how well the strategy traded. Full Allocation divides by what you had to keep reserved in case a deal needed everything.

Deployed is the more accurate of the two, because it measures the profit against the money that genuinely went into trades. Full Allocation will always read lower, since it divides by everything you had set aside, including orders that never needed to fire. That makes it the number to look at when you are deciding how much capital to keep free, while Deployed is the one that tells you how the strategy actually performed.