Backtesting overview
What backtesting is, its current availability, and how to use it.
Backtesting lets you simulate your strategy logic against historical candle data — up to 2 years — to evaluate its past performance before going live. This article explains how the backtest engine works, what assumptions it makes, and when to use it versus paper trading.
Plan access
Backtesting is included from the Investor plan (5 lifetime runs) and is unlimited on Trader, Pro, and Enterprise. The Free plan does not include backtesting. A run counts against the allowance once it starts.
What backtesting does
Backtesting runs your strategy logic against historical candle data to simulate how it would have performed over a past period.
Key characteristics:
- Fills execute at the next-open price after a signal fires (no look-ahead bias).
- Each fill includes 0.1% slippage and a 0.1% commission.
- Position size matches the agent: a $15 order is simulated as $15, and a percent size is a percent of the backtest's starting capital.
- Max executions stops new entries the same way a deployed agent does. The open trade is still closed by its exit rule.
- P&L is expressed in USD.
- Maximum historical window: 2 years.
- Order type assumptions are simplified — market orders.
What backtesting doesn't do
- Backtesting does not account for liquidity — large orders fill at the open price regardless of size.
- It holds one position at a time on a single market. A scan that can hold several coins at once is a different replay.
- Paper trading (forward simulation) is a separate feature and is available to all users.
When to use it
Backtesting is useful for:
- Checking whether a strategy had any historical edge
- Identifying obvious failure modes (always losing, over-trading, drawdown profile)
- Comparing different parameter sets
Always validate with a forward paper-trading period before going live.