No. The core use case begins after you already have a backtest or trade history. We investigate the behavior inside those results rather than asking you to rebuild the strategy in a new strategy language.
Frequently asked questions
What BackTest Forensics is—and what it isn't.
A research service for traders and strategy developers who already have backtest or trade-history results and want to investigate the behavior behind them.
Product
Backtest investigation
No. An optimizer usually searches for parameter values or filters that improve historical performance. BackTest Forensics first reconstructs the trade path, identifies the failure behavior, attaches market-state context, tests competing explanations, and asks what evidence survives matched comparisons or later data. The goal is explanation before modification.
It means looking beyond final P&L. A trade can be studied through Maximum Adverse Excursion (MAE), meaning the largest move against the position while the trade is open; Maximum Favorable Excursion (MFE), meaning the largest move in the trade's favor; time underwater; time to MAE; time to MFE; recovery after adverse movement; excursion sequence; giveback after MFE; holding time; and exit efficiency. Two trades with the same final profit can have very different underlying behavior.
Examples include why one direction is weak, whether stops are cutting off recoverable trades, how long winners typically stay underwater, whether Maximum Adverse Excursion (MAE) tends to occur before Maximum Favorable Excursion (MFE), whether winners give back too much favorable excursion, whether losses cluster in a particular session or regime, and whether performance deterioration coincided with a market-state change.
They are starting points, not endpoints. Maximum Adverse Excursion (MAE) tells us the worst move against the trade while it was open. Maximum Favorable Excursion (MFE) tells us the best move in the trade's favor. We then study when those moves happened, how long the trade stayed underwater, whether it recovered, how much favorable opportunity was captured, how much was given back, and which conditions were present. The value comes from connecting these behaviors rather than simply reporting the maximum values.
No. A historical weakness should be investigated and challenged before another filter, threshold or exception is added. If a potential change is worth testing, the research should also examine what valuable trades that change would remove or damage.
Yes. Any historical analysis can discover patterns that do not persist. That is why the workflow emphasizes chronology, matched controls, holdouts and out-of-sample checks where the available data permits them.
Data and privacy
Your strategy stays yours.
No. Many investigations can be performed from trade history and backtest outputs. You may optionally provide selected strategy variables when they are relevant, but proprietary formulas and implementation logic are not required by default.
Yes. The live BackTest Forensics intake accepts CSV and XLSX trade-history/backtest files. Submit the backtest report together with your research question; source code is not required.
No. Never submit brokerage credentials, API keys, authentication tokens, private keys or account passwords. They are not needed for backtest diagnostics.
Research capabilities
How deep can the investigation go?
Yes when the required market data is available. The EdgeQuery research layer can compare trade-path behavior with trend, volatility, session and other market-state classifications rather than treating every trade as if it occurred in the same environment.
Options and gamma context can be applied where the instrument and available historical data support it. It is not forced onto markets or periods where the required data is unavailable.
Macro-event context is part of the EdgeQuery research architecture when official historical event data is available, allowing event-window behavior to be compared with ordinary trading periods.
BackTest Forensics is the retail-facing research brand. EdgeQuery IQ is the underlying market-state intelligence, trade-forensics and research infrastructure used to perform the investigation.