How to read these numbers.
Every strategy page on Asteria shows the same set of metrics: annualized return, drawdown, Sharpe, profit factor, MAR, win rate. They mean the same thing whether the strategy trades crypto perpetuals, spot, equities or futures — only the typical ranges differ. Here is what each one actually means, what's a good value, and the trap each one hides. No formulas you don't need.
In-sample vs Out-of-sample
The big two numbers on every strategy card live next to each other and mean different things.
In-sample (5y research, 2021–2026) — the strategy was developed, tuned and tested against this period. It is not a prediction. It tells you "this is how the idea would have looked on the data we used to design it." It will always look good, because if it didn't we'd have thrown the strategy away.
Out-of-sample (recent 12m OOS) — the strategy runs against the last twelve months after it was tuned. This is the reality-check. We recompute it weekly. If in-sample is 99% annualized and OOS is 30% annualized, the difference is honest decay, not a bug.
Annualized return
Annualized return is the smoothed yearly return that would take your starting balance to your ending balance over the same period. It makes different strategy samples easier to compare fairly.
Example: $1,000 → $1,610 in 2 years is 26.9% annualized, not 30.5%, because compounding matters.
Max drawdown
Drawdown is the worst peak-to-trough loss the strategy went through. If your account hit $10,000 and later dropped to $7,800 before recovering, that's a 22% drawdown.
This is the number that will decide whether you stay invested. Looking at return without drawdown is like buying a car based on top speed without checking the brakes.
MAR ratio
MAR = annualized return divided by max drawdown. It tells you how much return you got for each percent of pain.
A MAR of 1.0 means a strategy returned 30% per year and had a 30% drawdown — fair trade. A MAR of 3.0 means it returned 30% per year with only a 10% drawdown — exceptional.
Profit factor
Profit factor = total dollars won ÷ total dollars lost. A profit factor of 2.0 means for every $1 the strategy lost, it made $2.
Win rate
Win rate is the percentage of trades that closed profitable. By itself, it tells you nothing about whether the strategy makes money.
Trend-following strategies typically have 30–50% win rate with big winners. Mean-reversion strategies typically have 70–90% win rate with small winners and occasional big losers. This holds across asset classes — crypto, futures, equities — only the trade sizes scale.
Trade count
The number of trades behind a backtest. The more trades, the more confident we can be that the result isn't an accident.
Why your live result will differ from the backtest
Even an honest, properly tested strategy will not match its backtest in production. Reasons:
| Reason | Typical impact |
|---|---|
| Slippage — the price you actually fill at vs the price the backtest assumes. | 0.1–0.5% per trade |
| Fees — taker/maker fees + funding on perpetuals. | 0.05–0.15% per round trip |
| Latency — milliseconds between signal and order. | Negligible for swing strategies, painful for HFT |
| Liquidity — the backtest assumes you got the price; in real life sometimes the order rests or partially fills. | Strategy-dependent |
| Regime change — the market behaves differently after the strategy was developed. | The big one |
Red flags to spot
If you see any of the below, pause and think before depositing capital:
| Annualized return > 300% on a long backtest | Usually overfitting. Probably won't survive. |
| Max drawdown not shown | Walk away. This is the most important number. |
| Win rate 95%+ | Almost always means "no stop loss; one bad trade wipes the gains." |
| Fewer than 30 trades | Not enough data to conclude anything. |
| Backtest period doesn't include 2022 bear market | Survivorship — strategy hasn't been tested in pain. |
| No out-of-sample number published | You're looking at the curve they fit, not a forecast. |
What Asteria does with all this
Every strategy on the Strategies page shows the in-sample headline next to the recent 12m OOS, with trade count and drawdown alongside. The Risk Center on your Dashboard alerts you if your live drawdown exceeds 10% from your peak balance, and recommends pausing new entries above 20%. The Cockpit page (beta) lets you watch the strategy's decisions tick by tick on any ticker before you commit real capital. Nothing here is investment advice — but everything here is shown the same way every quant fund shows them internally.