Practice Portfolio

What the practice portfolio tracks

The portfolio page is the scoreboard for your simulated account. It shows every open position with its entry price, current simulated price and unrealised profit or loss, plus a full history of closed trades with realised results. Your data lives in your browser's local storage, so clearing site data resets the account.

Beyond raw P&L, the page calculates the metrics that actually describe a process rather than an outcome: win rate, average win versus average loss, Sharpe ratio as a rough risk-adjusted measure, and maximum drawdown — the deepest peak-to-trough fall your equity curve has taken.

How to read your own numbers honestly

• A high win rate with a terrible average loss is a losing system. Compare average win to average loss before celebrating.
• Maximum drawdown is the number that decides whether you could have stuck with the approach in real life.
• Fewer than about thirty trades is not a sample. Do not draw conclusions from a good week.
• If one position drives most of the return, you learned about that position, not about your method.

Why results here do not transfer one-to-one

Simulated fills are optimistic, there are no commissions or financing costs, and no simulator can replicate the discomfort of a real drawdown. Use the portfolio to judge consistency and discipline, and assume live results will be meaningfully worse than practice results.

The metrics explained in plain language

• Unrealised P&L: what an open position is worth right now versus what you paid. It is not money until you close.
• Realised P&L: the result of trades you have actually closed. This is the number that measures decisions you finished making.
• Win rate: the share of closed trades that made money. Useless without the average size of wins and losses next to it.
• Sharpe ratio: a rough measure of return relative to volatility. Higher means smoother, not necessarily larger, returns.
• Maximum drawdown: the largest fall from a peak in your equity curve. The single most useful number for judging whether an approach is survivable.

Reviewing the portfolio weekly

Set a fixed weekly review. Look at the three worst trades and ask whether each was a bad decision or a good decision with a bad outcome — the two are different, and confusing them is how traders abandon working methods and keep broken ones.

Then look at the largest win with the same suspicion. Outsized winners often come from oversized positions rather than better analysis, and a habit that produces one great week can produce one catastrophic week later.