Understanding the Dashboard

The Dashboard is your command center. Each strategy displays 4 essential metrics:

Win Rate — The percentage of winning trades. Beware the trap: a 25% Win Rate can be excellent! Mean-Revert Sniper only wins a quarter of its trades, but its gains far exceed its losses, for a +11% PnL. Conversely, an 80% Win Rate strategy that loses big on each defeat can be catastrophic.

Sharpe Ratio — Invented by William Sharpe (Nobel 1990), it's THE king ratio. It measures how much return you get per unit of risk. A Sharpe > 1.0 is good, > 2.0 is excellent. On Strategy Arena, the best strategies exceed 2.0.

PnL (Profit & Loss) — Total gain or loss as a percentage. It's the bottom line, but beware: a big PnL with a low Sharpe means you just got lucky.

Max Drawdown — The worst drop from a peak. If your strategy has a -15% Max Drawdown, you would have seen your capital drop 15% at some point. It's the survival metric: can you psychologically handle that drop?

On the Dashboard, 58 strategies compete in real-time. Sort by Sharpe for the most consistent, by PnL for the best performers, by Drawdown for the safest.

How to Read a Leaderboard

Let's take a concrete Dashboard example: Mean-Revert Sniper shows only 24% Win Rate, but +11% PnL. How is this possible? The answer is one word: asymmetry. Each Mean-Revert Sniper win is about 4x bigger than each loss. Imagine a poker player who often loses small bets but occasionally wins the jackpot — over time, they're way ahead.

Conversely, a strategy with 80% Win Rate can be terrible if its few losses are gigantic. This is the classic trap for beginner traders: they prefer "being right often" over "making money".

Profit Factor Explained

The Profit Factor is a simple ratio: sum of gains / sum of losses. A Profit Factor of 1.0 means you win as much as you lose (break even). A Profit Factor of 1.5 means for every dollar lost, you gain $1.50. Key thresholds:

- < 1.0: Losing strategy — you lose more than you win
- 1.0 - 1.3: Mediocre — transaction fees will probably eat everything
- 1.3 - 2.0: Good — the strategy has a real edge
- > 2.0: Excellent — but check it's not overfitting

On the Dashboard, sort strategies by Profit Factor to immediately see which ones have a real edge. Combine this with the Sharpe Ratio for a complete picture: a Profit Factor of 1.8 with a Sharpe of 1.5 is a sign of a solid, consistent strategy.