08/08/2023 |
TrendSpider Software Update: New Performance Chart and Tabular Data Metrics
Hello, traders, and welcome to yet another software update from your friends here at TrendSpider! In this update, we’re pleased to bring a slew of new data to the Performance Chart and Tabular Data sections of the Strategy Tester, as well as a nice quality-of-life upgrade. Details after the jump!
When it comes to trading strategies, understanding the data behind your ideas is the key to perfecting them! Let’s walk through all of the new items that are now available.
New Performance Chart Data
In the top left-hand corner of your Performance Chart, we have added a number of new measurements to help you more deeply understand the performance of your strategies! They are as follows:
Sharpe Ratio
The Sharpe Ratio is a measure used to understand the average return of an investment compared to its risk. Specifically, it calculates the excess return, or risk premium, per unit of deviation in an investment asset or a trading strategy. A higher Sharpe Ratio indicates that the returns are better adjusted for risk.
At different times, your strategy might have a different fit relative to the overall performance of the asset it’s trading. These new measurements allow you to see how both the ratios of your strategy and of buy and hold change as the market changes, providing a window into the strength of your correlation. Sharpe ratios are best fit for strategies that utilize the daily time frame or higher.
Sortino Ratio
The Sortino Ratio is a statistical tool used to measure the performance of an investment relative to its downward risk. It’s similar to the Sharpe Ratio, but it only considers the harmful volatility, or downside risk, not the total volatility. A higher Sortino Ratio indicates a more favorable risk-reward profile. In simple terms, it tells you how much return you’re getting for the “bad” risk you’re taking on.
In this chart, you will notice some gaps. Gaps are a consequence of intraday testing yielding unrealistic values for the ratio. Much like Sharpe Ratio, the Sortino Ratio is best utilized on a daily time frame or higher.
Realized Volatility
Realized Volatility is a measure of how much the price of an asset has actually moved around in the past. It’s calculated based on historical price data, specifically, the standard deviation of the returns. In simple terms, realized volatility tells you how volatile an asset’s price has been over a given period.
In the image below, we see both the Realized Volatility for the strategy and the asset.
Correlation
The correlation between the performance of an asset and the strategy used to trade it refers to how closely the outcomes of your trading strategy match the price movements of the asset. The correlation can change over time as market conditions change. For example, a strategy that works well during periods of high volatility might not perform well when markets are calm, and vice versa.
Changes To Tabular Data
With this update, we’ve also made some changes to the way certain Tabular Data metrics are calculated.
Sharpe Ratio and Sortino Ratio
The Sharpe and Sortino ratios that we calculate are trailing metrics. Each of them uses a sliding window that depends on the timeframe of your backtest. For shorter timeframes, like 15 minutes, the window size is smaller (30 days), while for a backtest on a Daily chart, the window size is larger (90 days).
We compute these metrics day by day, moving from left to right, similar to how a simple moving average is calculated. When calculating the ratio, we use the risk-free return ratio from the corresponding point in time. For example, if we are calculating the Sharpe ratio for Jan 2020, we use the risk-free return ratio from Jan 2020.
When calculating the Sharpe ratio, we use “daily performance”. We separate your equity curve into days, and then we compute trailing Sharpe day by day. The same principle applies to the Sortino ratio and the realized volatility calculation. Be aware that it might create biased estimates for intraday strategies. The approximate formula for Sharpe in our case is as follows;
Sharpe = (DAILY_PERF - RISK_FREE_DAILY_PERF) / stdev(return) * sqrt(BUSINESS_DAYS_IN_YEAR);The risk-free return rate we use is based on the 10-year bond yield, sourced from the Federal Reserve. You can access and verify this data in the “Other Data” tab using the provided free data.
Correlation
The Correlation value is now offered within Tabular Data. It represents the correlation between Buy & Hold and the performance of your strategy. It is computed as Pearson of per-candle change% curves (i.e, for every candle we use change% of your portfolio since the last candle, and do the same with Buy & Hold)
Beta
Beta is now computed via the correlation between the “candle change% curve”, where each value is “portfolio change% since the previous candle”. This new methodology is more in line with the standard way of thinking about Beta and will yield different results for some strategies. In some instances, the differences will be quite noticeable whereas in others it will not be.
Quality-Of-Life Changes
It is now possible to zoom into specific areas on the Performance Chart you might be interested in more closely inspecting. To do this, simply click and drag to highlight the section of the chart you’re interested in.
The chart will automatically expand the highlighted section to encompass the full width of the chart view.
As always, we hope you find this update helpful and, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us via the ‘Contact Us’ button in the bottom right-hand corner of your chart view.
Interested in trying TrendSpider? Start a free 7-day trial below!
