Portfolios, Accounts & Live Trading

The one mental model

Four things stack, in order: Strategy, Backtest, Portfolio, Account.

A Strategy is the rule set (entry, exit, position design, sizing). It never appears as an object in the app; you express it by filling in the fields of a Backtest. A Backtest applies that Strategy to historical data. A Portfolio combines backtests, each with a percentage allocation of one capital pool. An Account wraps at most one Portfolio, or none, and runs it forward on live data.

Everything above the Account is design and evaluation over history. The Account is where a set of rules starts trading forward in time. The full framing sits on its own page; every other page in this section builds on this hierarchy without re-deriving it.

In this section

• From backtest to live trading: why a layer beyond a single backtest exists, and how the four levels fit together.
• Combine backtests into a Portfolio: allocations, one shared capital pool and date range, and the combined performance report.
• Accounts and the entity hierarchy: what an Account is, its five fields, and how it sits over a Portfolio.
• Account states and lifecycle: Running, Paused, and Stopped, the actions that move between them, and the one transition the system runs on its own.
• Promote a Portfolio to an Account: attaching a Portfolio, why every attach is a swap, and the Stop now versus Queue the swap choice.
• Snapshots and inspecting an account: the point-in-time copy an Account trades, and how to inspect and clone it without touching what it runs.
• The References panel: seeing every entity your open tabs depend on, recursively, across any project.
• The account ledger: the append-only event log that drives an Account's capital.
• Paper vs live trading and brokers: simulated versus real execution, where capital comes from, and linking a broker.