Long Position

Going long means buying an asset in the expectation that its price will rise. The profit is the difference between your exit price and your entry price, times the quantity:

PnL = (exit price − entry price) × quantity

Buy 0.5 BTC at $60,000, sell at $64,000, and you make (64,000 − 60,000) × 0.5 = $2,000 before fees.

Risk profile

A spot long can at worst go to zero, so the most you can lose is what you paid. Leverage changes that arithmetic: a 10× levered long is wiped out by roughly a 10% move against you.

In strategy code

In AlphaProve strategies, a long entry is expressed as Signal(direction='LONG', ...). The engine opens the position at the next bar's open price and tracks its PnL until something closes it: a stop-loss, a take-profit, an opposite signal, or a time-based exit.

On AlphaProve

Holding several longs at once is governed at the portfolio level, not only per trade: max_open_positions caps how many run concurrently and max_concentration_pct limits how much equity a single symbol can absorb, so a basket of correlated longs can't quietly turn into one oversized bet. While a backtest runs, the live SSE stream reports each long as it opens and marks its unrealized PnL tick by tick, ending in the run summary rather than only showing a final number.