Everything on the previous pages converges on one task: reading a record and deciding what it proves. This page puts the questions in the order that gets to the answer fastest.
Provenance
Is it verified by a third party from a stated start date, with the account type shown and no resets? If not, it is a claim. If so, how long is it in months and, more importantly, in trades? Under a hundred trades, it is a beginning. Under six months, it has not met a bad period.
Risk
What is the maximum equity drawdown, not balance? What risk per trade does the lot sizing imply? What was the total open risk at the worst moment? What leverage was the account at? A return without these is a numerator without a denominator.
Shape
Is the equity curve's smoothness consistent with the win rate? A 90 per cent win rate with a smooth curve is held losses. Is the profit spread across many trades, or concentrated in a few days or one instrument? Does the record include a losing period, and how did the strategy behave in it? Are the drawdowns of a size and frequency the strategy's own arithmetic would produce?
Behaviour
Does every trade carry a stop? Do holding times match the description? Do the markets traded match the markets claimed? Were trades opened around news or rollover? Did the settings change during the record, and when?
Regime
What kind of market did the record cover? Would the strategy's stated dependency have hurt it in the periods the record does not include? Is there any evidence, from a backtest with stated assumptions or from year-by-year results, of behaviour outside the recorded regime?
A record: verified, live, 22 months, 310 trades, maximum equity drawdown 14 per cent, implied risk one per cent per trade, equity curve with three visible drawdowns and a flat quarter, 41 per cent win rate with winners 1.9 times losers, every trade stopped, profit spread across seven markets, no settings changes, covering a rate-rise year and a rising year. That is a record that supports a cautious conclusion: the strategy has an edge of about a fifth of an R per trade, its drawdowns run to the mid-teens at this risk, and it has met at least two kinds of market. A second record: verified, demo, 5 months, 60 trades, 8 per cent drawdown, 78 per cent win rate, average loser three times the average winner, 40 per cent of profit from one week. That supports nothing.
This order takes ten minutes and eliminates most records at the first or second step. What remains is a small number of strategies whose records mean something, and the decision between them is about fit: markets, broker, account type and the risk you would hold through the drawdown the record shows. The return figure, the first thing every seller shows, is the last thing that matters, and by the time you reach it you already know what it is worth.