Getting started

Welcome to AlphaProve. Here's the short version: sign in, describe a strategy in plain English, and let the assistant write, backtest, and score it for you. No coding and no API calls: everything on this page happens by clicking in the app.

What you need

Just an AlphaProve account. New accounts start on the free tier, which is enough to describe strategies and run backtests within the quota and lookback caps.

Open the app and sign in with your email and password. Don't have an account yet? Click Create one. It's instant, and you land straight in the workspace.

2. Find your way around

The sidebar on the left is your map. You'll spend most of your time in the first few items:

New Strategy: start here. Describe an idea and the assistant builds it.
Chat History: every conversation, so you can pick up where you left off.
Library: your saved strategies, ready to re-run or tweak.
Results: the tearsheet from every backtest you've run.
Forward Walk and Risk: deeper tuning once you have a strategy you like.
Editor: write the strategy code yourself (optional: see the end).

3. Describe your strategy

On New Strategy, tell the assistant what you want to test in plain English. Not sure where to start? The greyed-out example shows the kind of thing that works, and the starter chips below the box give you one-click ideas.

Type your own idea (an entry rule, a symbol, a timeframe) and press Send.

4. Answer a couple of questions

Before it writes any code, the assistant fills in the gaps. Here it asks how you want to exit the trade and manage risk, and offers sensible presets you can click, or you can type your own answer.

Once it has what it needs, the assistant writes the strategy, explains what it built, and offers to backtest it.

5. Backtest and read the results

Run the backtest straight from the chat. Before it starts, a Risk & sizing panel lets you review the market, date window, capital, and leverage the assistant picked. Adjust anything, or just run with the defaults.

Results stream in live and settle into a full tearsheet: an equity curve, the headline numbers (total return, Sharpe, max drawdown, win rate, trade count), and the list of trades. Every run stays available later under Results in the sidebar.

The app, page by page

The walkthrough above is the fast path. This section is the reference: every item in the sidebar, what it's for, and every choice you can make on it, in plain terms. Some pages are part of the Trader or Pro plans; that's noted where it applies.

New Strategy

This is the home screen and where most work starts. You describe a trading idea in plain English and the assistant turns it into a working strategy.

The prompt box: type your idea, then press Send (or the Enter key). A greyed-out example inside the box shows the kind of thing that works.
Starter chips: one-click ideas below the box (a moving-average "golden cross", an RSI oversold bounce, a MACD crossover). Clicking one fills the box so you can tweak it before sending.
More examples: for more ideas than the starter chips, the Examples page collects complete strategies to learn from.
Clarifying questions: before writing anything, the assistant asks about anything you left out (which market to trade, how to exit, how much to risk) and offers quick-pick answers, or you can type your own.
"I understood this as": the assistant shows its understanding of your idea for you to approve with Looks good → Generate, or correct by replying in the chat. If part of your idea can't be built, it tells you which part.
Run backtest: once the strategy is written, this button opens the Run settings panel (below) and tests it.

The Run settings panel

Whenever you start a backtest (from here, from Library, or from Risk), a panel lets you review and adjust everything about the test. The assistant fills in sensible defaults; change what you like, or just press Run.

Market & window
- Symbol: which market to trade, such as BTCUSDT. (Default: BTCUSDT.)
- Timeframe: the candle size the strategy trades on, from 1 minute up to 1 day. Smaller candles mean more, faster trades. (Default: 1h.)
- Start and end date: the slice of history to test over. You can only pick dates real market data exists for; the panel shows the available range. (Default: roughly the last 90 days up to today.) Your plan limits how far back you can go.
Capital & leverage
- Initial capital: the pretend starting balance for the simulation. (Default: 10,000.)
- Leverage: how much borrowing the account is allowed. Higher leverage means bigger swings and an earlier "liquidation" (forced close) point. It does not decide how big each trade is. Your plan sets the ceiling: Free 10×, Trader 50×, Pro 100×. (Default: 1×, i.e. no borrowing.)
Risk & sizing
- Position sizing sets how the size of each trade is decided:
  - Risk per trade: every trade risks the same small slice of your balance, worked out from how far away your stop is. (The default.)
  - Percent of equity: each trade uses a set percentage of your balance.
  - Fixed notional: every trade is the same dollar amount.
  - Fixed contracts: every trade is the same number of units.
  - Leverage-based options: the two above, scaled up by your leverage.
- Dynamic risk: optionally shrink your risk automatically when you're losing (as losses deepen, or after a losing streak). Off by default; when on, a risk floor sets how low it's allowed to go.
Strategy parameters: if the strategy has adjustable knobs (moving-average lengths, an RSI threshold, a stop style, and so on) they appear here with the strategy's own defaults, so you can tune it without touching any code.
Fill model: there's nothing to choose here. Every backtest prices trades against the recorded L2 order book (minute-resolution depth, modelling how a large order actually moves the price) wherever that data exists, and falls back to 1-minute candle simulation for any part of the window without book coverage (recorded depth starts in 2023; candles go back further). One known simplification: resting limit orders fill fully on first touch (no queue-position modelling).
Advanced
- Margin mode: cross means your whole balance backs every position; isolated gives each position its own walled-off margin. Cross survives volatility longer; isolated caps the damage from a single bad trade. (Default: cross.)
- Max open positions: the most trades allowed open at once. (Default: 2.)
- Max drawdown stop: an automatic circuit-breaker that halts the run if the account falls this far from its peak. Off by default.

Library

Every strategy you save lands here, ready to re-run, tune, forward-walk, or publish. The counters at the top show how many you've saved, how many you've tested, and how many are currently profitable.

Views and filters: quick tabs (All, Recently tested, Best Sharpe) plus a Filters panel to narrow the list by symbol, timeframe, quality (Sharpe range), worst drawdown, age, whether it's been tested, and whether it's editable. Any filter combination can be saved as your own named view. You can also sort by most recent, best Sharpe, or name.
What each row shows: the strategy's name, its status (never tested, running, completed, failed), timeframe, number of trades, win rate, return, worst drawdown, and a small equity sparkline.
Per-strategy actions
- Test / Test again: run a backtest (opens the Run settings panel).
- Cancel / Retry: stop a run in progress, or retry one that failed.
- Forward walk: stress-test it on unseen data. (Trader and Pro.)
- Edit code / View code: open it in the Editor. Editing needs a paid plan; AI-written strategies may be view-only.
- Publish: list it on the marketplace. (Pro, once it has a completed backtest.)
- Rename / Delete.
Bulk actions: tick several strategies to backtest or delete them all at once. How many backtests can run at the same time depends on your plan (Free 1, Trader 3, Pro 5).
Strategy detail: clicking a name opens its own page: a summary of its last backtest, the equity curve, a link to the full tearsheet, the original prompt that created it, and a copy of its configuration you can copy to the clipboard.

Results

Every backtest you run is kept here, along with the full report, the tearsheet, for each one. The list can be filtered by status and sorted by any column, and it refreshes itself while runs are still working. From the list you can open a run's tearsheet, or cancel and delete runs.

The tearsheet explains how a strategy did. The headline numbers, in plain terms:

Net PnL: the bottom line in dollars, how much the strategy made or lost.
PnL %: the same result as a percentage of your starting balance.
Sharpe: a quality score that rewards steady gains and penalizes a bumpy ride. Higher is better; above about 1 is decent, above 2 is strong.
Win Rate: the share of trades that made money. On its own it doesn't guarantee profit: a few big losses can outweigh many small wins.
Max Drawdown: the worst drop from a high point before recovering. Smaller is safer.
Trades: how many trades the strategy made.
Extras: a row of smaller stats covering profit factor (dollars won divided by dollars lost), expectancy (the average result per trade), the average win and loss, and the best and worst single trades.

It also draws four charts: an equity curve (your balance over time, green above your starting point and red below), a price & trades chart (the market's candles with your entries and exits marked: green for winning exits, red for losing), an exit reasons breakdown (how trades closed: hit their profit target, hit their stop, closed on a signal, flipped, or were liquidated), and a P&L distribution (the shape of your results: many small wins versus a few big ones). Below the charts, the trade log lists every trade with its entry and exit price, size, profit, fees, and how long it was held. The equity curve and the trade log can both be downloaded as spreadsheets.

Forward Walk

Trader and Pro

Forward Walk is part of the Trader and Pro plans.

A backtest can look great simply because you kept tuning it until it fit the past. That's curve fitting, and it rarely survives real markets. Forward Walk guards against it: the app repeatedly tunes the strategy on one stretch of history, then tests those settings on the next, unseen stretch, and joins the unseen results end to end. If the strategy still makes money on data it never saw, its edge is more likely real.

Setup
- Pick a strategy: it must have adjustable parameters to tune; the app shows which ones will be tried.
- Market, dates, capital, leverage, sizing: the same choices as a normal backtest (see the Run settings panel above).
- In-sample window (months): how much past data to tune on at each step. (Default: 4.)
- Out-of-sample window (months): how much later, unseen data to then test on. This is the honesty check. (Default: 2.)
- Anchored vs rolling: rolling keeps the tuning window a fixed length that slides forward; anchored always starts at the same point and grows, so each step learns from all the history so far. (Default: rolling.)
- Parameter grid: a read-only preview of which knobs will be tried and over what values (these are set inside the strategy itself), plus how many combinations that adds up to and whether it's within your plan's limit.
Reading the results
- WFO efficiency: the headline score, how much of the tuned-in performance survived on unseen data. Roughly, 0.70 or higher is strong and below 0.40 suggests the strategy was curve-fit.
- Out-of-sample totals: the profit, number of trades, win rate, and worst drawdown across all the unseen windows.
- Stitched equity curve: a single line of only the unseen results, the closest thing to "how would I actually have done".
- Per-step table: for each window, which settings were picked and how they performed on unseen data, so you can see whether the best settings stay steady over time or jump around.

Risk

Trader and Pro

The Risk page is part of the Trader and Pro plans.

This page is where you set how much you're willing to risk and stress-test a strategy's results before trusting them.

Leverage and margin: your plan sets the maximum leverage (Free 10×, Trader 50×, Pro 100×), and you choose cross or isolated margin. The risk settings themselves (leverage, position sizing, dynamic risk, and stops) are the same ones in the Run settings panel described under New Strategy above.
Monte Carlo: takes one backtest and replays it thousands of times with the trades shuffled, some skipped, or the settings nudged, to show the whole range of outcomes luck could have produced, including the chance of wiping out the account and a typical worst-case drawdown. It answers "was my result skill, or a lucky order of trades?"
Prop Firm: simulates how often the strategy would pass a funded-trader evaluation (reaching a profit target without breaking a loss limit) and shows the pass/fail odds.

Editor

Trader

Writing and editing code in the Editor is part of the Trader plan and above. Free users can view an AI-written strategy's code but not change it.

The Editor is the optional, advanced path. Instead of describing your idea to the assistant, you write the strategy yourself, with full control over every detail. Most people never need it. The assistant handles the same job in plain English.

It's a proper code workspace with live hints for the building blocks, automatic error-checking, and a few actions:

Load a strategy: open one of your own to keep working on it.
Save: checks your code for problems, then saves it (asking you to name it if it's new). The app refuses to save code it judges unsafe to run.
Save to library: pins the strategy to your Library so it's easy to find.
Test: sends the strategy to the run screen to backtest it.

A brand-new strategy starts from a small working example rather than a blank page, so you always have a shape to build on.

When you want the details of writing a strategy by hand, these pages go deeper:

Strategy authoring: the rules for writing, validating, and submitting a custom strategy.
SDK reference: the full toolkit your code works with.
Examples: complete strategies to learn from.

Settings

Everything about your account lives here.

Profile: your email address, your current plan, and Sign out.
Backtest defaults: a default market, timeframe, starting capital, and leverage that pre-fill every new backtest, so you don't set them each time.
Usage: your daily AI-generation count and when it resets. Free plans include a set number of generations per day; paid plans are unlimited.
Plan: a side-by-side comparison of Free, Trader, and Pro and what each includes. Upgrades are arranged with the team. The button opens a pre-filled email.
AI provider: a read-only status showing which AI model powers the assistant. There's nothing to change here; it's set by the platform.