1. Trading can lose you money
Trading financial instruments carries a substantial risk of loss. You can lose some or all of the money you trade with.
Leveraged products — including CFDs, futures, margin foreign exchange and crypto perpetual futures — magnify both gains and losses. Losses can build up quickly, and with some products and brokers you can lose more than you deposited.
Only trade with money you can afford to lose. If you’re not sure trading is right for you, get independent advice.
2. Backtests are simulations
Every result on Kurzharr is hypothetical. It shows how a strategy would have behaved on past data, under our assumptions. No real orders were placed. Simulated results have limits that real trading doesn’t:
- Hindsight. Strategies are designed knowing what already happened. Our checks try to catch this, but they can’t fully remove it.
- No real execution. Fills are modelled. Entries and signal exits fill at the next bar’s open. When one bar touches both the stop and the target, the stop is assumed to have been hit first, and a price gap through a level fills at that bar’s open. Real fills can be worse.
- Slippage and liquidity. The simulation doesn’t know whether there was enough volume for your order, or how your order would have moved the price.
- Futures rolls. Simulated futures positions are closed at each contract roll, which may not match how you’d trade.
- Data. A result can only be as good as the price data behind it (see below).
- Real conditions. A simulation doesn’t feel the pressure of real money, and doesn’t capture outages, margin calls or changes to your broker’s rules.
Past performance, real or simulated, is not a reliable indicator of future results.
3. What a verdict means — and doesn’t
A Cleared verdict means none of the checks that produced a result failed, on the data we had and under our assumptions. Cleared with one gap means exactly one check didn’t pass. Some checks may produce no result — for example when there are too few trades, or when your plan doesn’t include them. Neither verdict is a recommendation to trade the strategy, a guarantee that it will make money, or a prediction of how it will perform.
The checks target common ways of fooling yourself: look-ahead leaks, a result that luck alone could explain, an edge that exists in only one period or one cluster of trades, and costs that are too optimistic. They reduce these risks; they can’t remove them. A strategy can clear every check and still lose money when traded live.
- On the Free plan, six of the eight checks run. A Free verdict hasn’t been through the placebo and cluster-inference checks.
- Each scorecard also shows a deflated-Sharpe figure, adjusted for how many trials your account has run. It’s shown beside the verdict and doesn’t change it.
- A verdict is a statistical judgement about whether an edge looks real. It doesn’t say how much money a strategy would make, or whether the result is worth the risk.
- Each check’s thresholds are choices. Other reasonable choices could give a different verdict.
- “Has not cleared” or “Not enough trades to grade” doesn’t prove an idea can never work — only that this test didn’t support it.
4. Costs may differ from your broker’s
Results include modelled trading costs, which depend on the market: for forex and CFDs, the spread, overnight financing (swap) and a commission profile if you set one; for crypto perpetuals, a trading fee and funding payments; for US equities and futures, a fixed reference estimate of fees and spread. Some inputs have gaps — for example, overnight financing figures cover only some forex and CFD symbols. Your broker’s real costs may be higher or structured differently, and they change over time. Before relying on a result, check the cost settings against your own broker’s terms.
5. Data limitations
Price data comes from third parties and may contain errors, gaps or bad prices. The known limits of each source:
- Forex and CFDs
- OANDA’s practice (demo) price feed. Demo prices and spreads can differ from OANDA’s live prices and from your broker’s. Timeframes above five minutes are built from five-minute bars.
- Crypto
- Binance USDT perpetual futures, one-hour bars and longer only.
- US equities
- Daily bars only (weekly bars are built from them), from Twelve Data’s free tier. The data isn’t survivorship-free: companies that were delisted can be missing, which can make results look better than they would have been. Timestamps haven’t been independently verified.
- CME Nasdaq-100 futures (NQ)
- From Databento. Contracts are joined by calendar date without price adjustment, so prices can jump at each roll.
Data is updated by jobs we run, not continuously, so the most recent period may be missing.
6. AI drafts can be wrong
AI features can misunderstand your description, leave things out or invent details. A drafted strategy is checked to make sure it compiles, and it’s held back if the model made up stop or target levels — but no check catches every mistake. Review every draft before you apply or run it. AI answers about a scorecard explain the result; they’re not advice.
7. The prop-challenge simulator
The simulator replays one stored run against a prop firm’s challenge rules. It models only some of those rules:
- It doesn’t simulate news-trading rules, lot-size caps or funded-stage rules.
- Weekend and overnight holding bans are flagged, not simulated.
- It assumes open losses were as bad as they could have been.
- It covers one symbol at a time, over at most 180 days.
The replay figure is how often the strategy would have passed if you’d started on each past day. That’s a historical frequency, not your probability of passing. Monte Carlo figures depend on how the trades are resampled.
Preset rules come from firms’ public pages and may be out of date. Always check the current rules with the firm. Naming a firm doesn’t mean it endorses or works with Kurzharr.
8. Your decisions are your own
You decide whether, what and how to trade, and you’re responsible for those decisions. Kurzharr doesn’t know your finances, goals or tolerance for risk, and doesn’t assess whether any strategy or product is suitable for you.
Nothing on Kurzharr is investment advice, a personal recommendation, or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any financial instrument. Consider independent advice from an authorised adviser before you trade.
9. Contact
Questions about this page: [Contact email].