Four free calculators that answer it. Paste your numbers and find out whether your strategy beats what pure luck produces — which is a much higher number than almost anyone realises. No signup, nothing leaves your browser.
Put a thousand people in a room and give each one a coin. Every morning they flip it — heads they buy, tails they sit in cash. No skill whatsoever.
After two years, one of them has a track record that looks like genius. Not because they were good, but because when a thousand people do something random, the luckiest one looks remarkable. If they posted it online you would follow them. They cannot tell either: from the inside, a lucky streak feels exactly like skill.
The same thing happens inside your own testing. You tried a 20-day average, then 50. You added a stop, then moved it. You changed the asset, then the start date. Each of those was a coin flipper, and by the time something finally worked you may have taken forty draws — and the best of forty random draws looks good.
That is not cheating. It is what everyone does. But it means your result has to beat a bar that rises every time you look, and almost nobody calculates that bar. These tools calculate it.
Enter how many times you looked and how long your test window was.
The score a strategy with no skill at all is expected to reach, given the same amount of searching you did. If your result is below this number, you have not found an edge — you have found the luckiest of however many things you tried. Most people discover their result sits below it, which is the normal and correct outcome.
The lower bar is the average best-of-N luck result, so half of all pure-noise searches beat it — enough to justify watching something, not enough to fund it. The higher bar is beaten by one noise search in twenty.
Paste your returns, or your account balance over time, straight from your backtester or broker export.
Three numbers describe any strategy and you need all three. Return is what it earned per year. Worst fall is the deepest loss you would have had to sit through without selling — the number that decides whether a strategy is livable. Sharpe is how much return you got per unit of stomach-churning; above 1.0 is good, below 0.5 means the returns came with a lot of noise.
Almost every strategy claims something is special — the first 30 minutes of the day, the week options expire, a 200-day average rather than 180. Rebuild your rule pointed at twenty arbitrary alternatives, then paste all the scores here.
Whether the thing your strategy is built around matters at all. Asking "is this profitable?" is nearly worthless — a third of arbitrary date windows are profitable. The useful question is "does it beat arbitrary versions of itself?" This is the cheapest high-value test there is, and it works on strategies you bought from someone else.
If your strategy’s selling point is smaller losses, this is the comparison that matters.
There is a trivially simple way to cut your drawdown: own less of the thing. Put 60% in and 40% in cash, and your worst fall drops by roughly 40% — no signals, no code. So the real test for any risk-management feature is whether it beats that. Most do not. Covered calls and trailing stops both fail this; trend filters pass it.
A rough scaling: holding a fraction f of the book gives roughly f times the drawdown and f times the arithmetic return, less compounding drag. Good enough to settle the question; use the Python harness on real position data for a number you would act on.
If a tool here told you something uncomfortable
The free first module explains the arithmetic behind these calculators in full — where the bar comes from, why looking twice raises it, and what to do when your result sits below it. No signup, ~14 minutes.
Read it freeThe full course is eight modules, twenty-one free data sources with the trap in each, twelve working download scripts and the searchable ledger of all 479 approaches I tested — 478 of which failed. See what is in it →