Exit reason is the recorded cause of a position being closed — take profit, stop loss, max hold, a rebalance, an Exclude screener, bankruptcy, or the instrument's price history ending — shown in the "Reason" column of a backtest's trade history. There are seven reasons in all, and every closing trade carries exactly one, so you can tell why each position left the strategy. It is a record of what the simulation did, not a setting: take profit, stop loss and max hold are the controls that decide when a position closes, while the exit reason tells you afterwards which of them closed it.
What are the exit reasons a backtest records?
Each closing trade is tagged with the reason it happened, drawn from a fixed set of seven causes:
- Take profit — the position reached its take-profit gain.
- Stop loss — the position reached its stop-loss threshold.
- Max hold — the position reached its maximum holding period (a time-based exit).
- Rebalance — the position was closed as part of a normal rebalance, when the strategy reweighted and no longer held it (this used to be called a "rotation").
- Exclude screener — at a rebalance the instrument matched one of the strategy's Exclude screeners, so it was dropped.
- Price history ended — the instrument's own price history ran out while the position was open, because it stopped trading. It is a property of that instrument, not of the backtest: a position still open on an instrument that is still trading when the backtest ends is not closed for this reason.
- Bankruptcy — a bankruptcy rule closed the position: the run, or the strategy inside a Combined, fell below 10% of its reference capital and everything it held was closed.
Defaults in Fincanva
- Shown in the "Reason" column of the Trade history table (Italian "Motivo").
- Recorded per closing trade — one position can open and close more than once, and each close carries its own reason.
- The reason is a record of what the simulation did; it is not a setting you edit.
Worked example
Across one backtest, five positions close for five different reasons: a stock up +20% shows Take profit; one that fell to its stop level shows Stop loss; one dropped at a scheduled reweight shows Rebalance; one held to its month cap shows Max hold; and one whose company was taken private mid-test, so its prices stop, shows Price history ended. Reading the Reason column tells you at a glance which rule ended each position.
An exit reason records what a simulation did on historical data, not what a position will do, and no reason in the column is a suggestion to close or hold anything. Fincanva provides no financial advice — see Is this financial advice?.
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Fincanva provides no financial advice. Backtests show what would have happened — not what will.
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