TradingView Strategy Tester explained

A Pine Script strategy sends simulated orders. The Strategy Tester replays the strategy over the chart's history, fills those orders by its own rules, and reports the result. It runs on every TradingView plan; paid plans reach further back in intraday history and add Deep Backtesting. See how to backtest on TradingView for free for the steps from an empty chart.

• Overview. The equity curve with the headline numbers: net profit, total closed trades, percent profitable, profit factor, maximum drawdown, average trade and average bars in a trade. Read net profit and profit factor together with the number of trades.
• Performance. The same numbers split into all trades, longs and shorts, plus gross profit and loss, commission paid and the largest winners and losers. A strategy that only works on one side is worth knowing about.
• Trades analysis. Wins and losses counted and averaged, the ratio of the average win to the average loss, and the longest runs.
• Risk and performance ratios. Sharpe and Sortino ratios and the like. Useful to compare versions of one strategy, less useful on their own.
• List of trades. Every trade: number, type (entry or exit, long or short), date and time, signal name, price, contracts, profit, cumulative profit, run-up and drawdown. This is the tab to export.

Open the strategy's settings and go to Properties:

• Initial capital and order size. Set the order size in contracts. One NQ is $20 a point, one MNQ $2, one ES $50, one MES $5; the P&L calculator does the arithmetic.
• Commission. Per contract, per order. Zero by default.
• Slippage. In ticks. One tick on NQ is $5 a contract; on a busy open it is often more.
• Fill options. Whether orders fill on the bar close, on the next bar's open, and how price is assumed to move inside a bar. Tight stops and targets inside a single bar are where these assumptions matter most; where your plan offers it, the bar magnifier reads lower timeframes to decide which was hit first.
• Pyramiding. How many entries in the same direction are allowed. Leave it at 1 unless the strategy scales in on purpose.

Trust the numbers in proportion to the number of trades. A profit factor over about 100 trades says something; over 20 it says very little. Look at the drawdown against the account you would trade it on, especially a prop-firm account with a trailing drawdown.

And remember what the summary averages away: the hour of the day, the market regime, the distance from VWAP, the days with economic releases. What your TradingView backtest isn't telling you goes through them.

1. Open the Strategy Tester with the strategy on the chart.
2. Press the export (download) icon at the top right of the panel.
3. Choose List of trades. TradingView saves a CSV with an entry row and an exit row per trade, written in your interface language.