Every run is recorded permanently, pass or fail, as a numbered trial against your account. That record is what stops the oldest trick in backtesting: running an idea fifty times and reporting only the run that cleared.
What a trial is
When you submit a run, the platform writes an immutable record: the hash of the exact spec, the floors it resolved, the timestamp, the tier, and the outcome. Nothing about it can be edited afterwards — not the floors, not the result. If you want the strategy judged against different floors, that is a new run, and it is a new trial.
Your Run history lists them all: trial number, outcome, observed Sharpe, trade count, tier, and a link to the stored scorecard where one exists. Trials recorded before durable scorecard storage existed show as “not stored” but still count.
The deflated-Sharpe accounting
Every scorecard shows a line like Trial 7 in your history · one per symbol tested, across all your strategies · Deflated-Sharpe significance 0.41. Each symbol a spec runs on is its own trial, and the count spans every strategy on your account, so starting a new strategy does not reset it. The deflated Sharpe takes your observed Sharpe and adjusts it downward for the number of trials you have spent, the non-normality of the returns, and the length of the sample. Run the same idea enough times and one version will look significant by luck; this is the number that accounts for that, across your whole history rather than the current run alone.
What does and does not count
- The first run of a strategy — a trial. Creating the strategy and running it are the same act.
- Every refinement — a trial. See Getting started on why the Refine tab keeps the change and the run as two separate steps.
- Registering for forward confirmation — not a trial. It records a hash and a date and computes nothing, so it cannot move the accounting. See Running & forward testing.
History is append-only. You cannot delete a trial — a record you could erase would let you keep only the runs that went well, which is the exact effect the accounting exists to defeat.
Deleting a strategy doesn’t delete its trials either. The strategy moves to Recently deleted on the Strategies page, where you can restore it for 30 days, and its trials stay in history, marked as coming from a deleted strategy, and keep counting.