---
title: "See where a strategy could go with the Projection tab"
description: "The Projection tab draws a cone of values a strategy could reach in one to five years, rebuilt from the days it already lived. A range, never a forecast."
canonical_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/analysis/see-where-a-strategy-could-go-with-the-projection-tab"
last_updated: "2026-10-07"
md_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/analysis/see-where-a-strategy-could-go-with-the-projection-tab.md"
---

# See where a strategy could go with the Projection tab

The **Projection** tab draws a cone of values a [strategy](/glossary/strategy) could reach one to five years ahead, built from the daily returns its [backtest](/glossary/backtest) has already lived — the spread its past makes plausible, never a forecast.

## Steps

1. **Open Projection.** Open the strategy, choose **Analysis**, then **Projection**. The tab is on every plan and needs a completed backtest; nothing is computed until you ask, and the chart reads "Choose a horizon and a method, then calculate".
2. **Choose the Horizon.** **1 year**, **2 years**, **3 years** or **5 years** ahead — a year here is 252 trading days.
3. **Choose the Method.** **Blocks of days**, selected when the tab opens, **Single days** or **Gaussian** — see [What does each projection method assume?](#what-does-each-projection-method-assume)
4. **Choose the Scenarios.** 500, 1,000, 2,000 or 10,000 paths; the note beside the list gives the most your plan allows.
5. **Press Calculate.** It takes a few seconds, and the button reads, for example, "Calculating 1,000 scenarios…". The cone is computed for the figures the tab is showing, so it stays on screen until you change a control or an assumption in **Simulation assumptions** — then calculate again.
6. **Read the cone.** The strategy's own curve, **History**, runs to the line marked **today** and opens into a fan: the light band, **5–95%**, holds the middle 90% of the scenarios at every future day; the darker band, **25–75%**, the middle half; the **Median** line is the middle scenario, with half ending above it and half below.

**Done.** The title gives the horizon ("In 3 years") and "Value today … · median …"; the table under the chart reads the cone at the horizon, one column per percentile from P5 to P95, each as a **Value** and as a **Change** from today's value ([projection cone](/glossary/projection-cone)). Under it the tab says "This is not a forecast.", how many past days it drew on and the date they run up to: one outcome in 20 lands below the light band, one in 20 above it.

## How is the projection cone built?

The cone is a Monte Carlo projection: each scenario is one possible path, built by drawing daily returns from the strategy's own backtest, one day after another up to the horizon, and compounding them from today's value — the last value of the backtest. Repeating that for every scenario gives a spread of end values, and at each future day the cone marks where the 5th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 95th percentiles of that spread fall. The same request on the same backtest always returns the same cone.

With **Blocks of days** and **Single days**, every day in a path is a day the strategy has already lived, so no single day is worse than the worst day of the backtest — but a run of bad days can stack up into a fall deeper than any in the backtest, so the cone's lower edge is not capped by history. With **Gaussian**, days are drawn from a normal curve rather than from the history, so a single day can also be worse than any the strategy lived. Either way, a history that happened to be kind makes a cone that is kind too: the cone measures how widely the past could have played out. For how much of the backtest itself could have been luck, see [the Robustness tab](/docs/analysis/test-how-much-to-trust-a-backtest-with-the-robustness-tab).

## What does each projection method assume?

The three methods answer "how is a future day drawn from the past?" differently, and each keeps a different property of the history.

- **Blocks of days** draws runs of consecutive days rather than single days, so a calm stretch stays calm and a turbulent one stays turbulent. The tendency of markets to have volatile spells, rather than volatile days scattered at random, survives into the paths. In textbook terms it is a block bootstrap.
- **Single days** draws each day independently from the history. Every day keeps its real size, but the order they came in is shuffled away, so spells of turbulence are broken up. It is the classic, independent (i.i.d.) bootstrap.
- **Gaussian** draws each day from a normal distribution with the history's own average and [volatility](/glossary/volatility). It keeps those two numbers and nothing else: the normal curve makes very large days rarer than markets actually produce them, and knows nothing of the order the days came in.

All three assume the future resembles the past; none of them can say whether it will. More **Scenarios** make the cone's edges steadier, not the projection truer — see [projection cone](/glossary/projection-cone#does-drawing-more-scenarios-make-a-projection-more-accurate).

## How far ahead does my plan let me project?

The Projection tab is on every plan, and a plan sets two limits on it. The first is the longest horizon, counted in trading days — 252 of them make one year:

Set by your plan: 252 on Free and Starter, 756 on Advanced and 1260 on Ultimate and Professional. See [what each plan includes](/docs/account-and-plan/what-each-plan-includes).

The second is the most scenarios one calculation may draw:

Set by your plan: 500 on Free, 1000 on Starter, 2000 on Advanced and 10000 on Ultimate and Professional. See [what each plan includes](/docs/account-and-plan/what-each-plan-includes).

A horizon or a scenario count beyond your plan still appears in its list, marked with the plan that includes it. Choosing it sends no calculation: it opens a window that says how far your plan goes and what the next plan up allows.

## Why is the projection unavailable, or different?

### The tab says the projection isn't available

The message reads "The projection isn't available for this simulation. If the backtest ran before the update, run it again to enable it." The projection draws on a record of daily returns that simulations stored before the tab existed do not have. Run the backtest again, then press **Calculate**.

### The cone changed after I switched costs or taxes

It was recalculated for different figures. The cone starts from the value the tab is showing and draws on the daily returns behind it, so with **Costs & interests** or **Taxes** on it projects the net figures, and with them off the gross ones. See [simulation assumptions](/glossary/simulation-assumptions).

Fincanva is for education and illustration only. It is not personalised financial advice, and past or simulated results do not predict future ones. [Read the Terms Addendum](https://fincanva.com/terms/addendum#section-3)