Metrics table
The metrics table is the read-out on a strategy's Performance Metrics page that sets every backtest figure for your strategy beside the same figure for its benchmark: Summary covers the whole period in six groups, and By year repeats six of the figures for each calendar year.
Also seen as: the metrics page, the summary table
How does Fincanva handle it?
- The benchmark runs as its own full simulation on the same dates and with the same starting capital, so every pair of figures compares like with like.
- Percentage rows are shown as percentages and ratio rows as plain numbers — Sharpe and Return-to-drawdown ratio are ratios.
- The three simulation assumptions — Costs & interests, Taxes, Reinvest profits — change which pre-computed set of figures the table reads; the switch is immediate and does not re-run the backtest.
- The table fills in only after a completed run. Before that the page reads "No results yet" and "Backtest this strategy to generate its metrics."
How to read it against the benchmark, year by year: Compare a strategy with its benchmark in Performance Metrics. Each row, with its convention: What every number in Performance Metrics means.
What does the Summary table show?
Summary has three columns — the metric, a Strategy value and a Benchmark value — and its rows are grouped under six headings:
- Performance: Total return (%), Years — the span the backtest covers, carried to decimal months, which turns a total into a yearly pace (annualization) — and CAGR, which reads AAGR while Reinvest profits is off. See total return, CAGR, AAGR.
- Drawdown: Max drawdown, Return-to-drawdown ratio, Longest drawdown (months) and Longest recovery (months). See drawdown, return-to-drawdown ratio, longest drawdown, longest recovery.
- Volatility and risk: Volatility, Semideviation (downside only), Risk-free rate and Sharpe. See volatility, semideviation, risk-free rate, Sharpe ratio.
- Worst days · 95%: Daily VaR · historical, Daily VaR · Gaussian and Daily CVaR · historical. See value at risk, conditional value at risk.
- Monthly performance: Positive months (%), Best month and Worst month. See positive months, best month and worst month.
- Averages: Monthly average and Yearly average. See monthly and yearly average.
What counts as a good value?
No single row answers that, and the table is built so that no single row has to. Each metric answers one narrow question — how much, how fast, how deep, how bumpy, how often — and reading one in isolation is how a result gets misread: a high return with a deep max drawdown and a high return with a shallow one are very different results with the same first number.
The Benchmark column exists for the same reason. It tells you which part of a figure was the market and which part was the strategy's own doing, which is a genuinely different question from whether the figure is large.
Used in 24 pages
- What every number in Performance Metrics means · Analysis
- Reading the monthly returns heatmap · Analysis
- Test how much to trust a backtest with the Robustness tab · Analysis
- Best month and worst month
- Beta
- Chart toggles
- Strategy analytics
- Max drawdown
- Equity curve
- Incomplete Combined
- Longest drawdown
- Longest recovery
- Monthly and yearly average
- Months matrix
- Positions summary table
- Positive months
- Reinvest profits
- Return-to-drawdown ratio
- Screener backtest
- Sharpe ratio
- Sortino ratio
- Total P&L
- Total return
- Volatility
UPDATED 2026-10-07