Question 1

How does the backtest engine actually work?

Accepted Answer

You compose strategies from a library of 300+ entry and exit signals — indicators, candlestick patterns, session and structure conditions. The engine evaluates rules on bar closes against CME futures data from Databento: 20+ million bars of 1-minute OHLCV across ES, NQ, RTY, YM, CL, and GC, going back to 2015. Orders fill at the next bar open — you see the signal at the close, you get the next print, not a fantasy mid-bar fill.

Question 2

What timeframes and sessions can I test?

Accepted Answer

Any bar size built up from 1-minute data — 5m, 15m, 1h, daily. Strategies run on the full futures session by default, or RTH-only (9:30 AM–4:00 PM ET) with the session filter, which is what most prop-firm traders want.

Question 3

How realistic are the fills?

Accepted Answer

Next-bar-open fills with configurable slippage and commission per contract. What we don't model: order-book depth, queue position, or partial fills — no retail backtesting tool sees that data honestly, so we don't pretend to. If your edge only survives at zero slippage, the slippage knob will tell you before a funded account does.

Question 4

How does the strategy search work?

Accepted Answer

Pick the signals you believe in and the engine composes and backtests combinations automatically, ranking results by Strata Score. Degenerate combinations — always-true conditions, nonsense comparisons — are excluded from the search pool rather than left in to inflate result counts. Run sizes vary by plan; see pricing.

Question 5

What is the Strata Score?

Accepted Answer

A 0–100 composite built from five weighted components: backtest performance (30%), Monte Carlo reshuffle (25%), out-of-sample stability (20%), trade count and consistency (15%), and lift over a random-strategy baseline (10%). Scores map to grades — 90+ is A+, 82+ A, 74+ B+, 65+ B, 50+ C, 35+ D, below that F. The score exists to kill fragile strategies before you fund them, not to flatter the ones you like.

Question 6

Can a high score still lose money live?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The score measures how well a strategy held up under everything we can throw at it historically — reshuffled trade sequences, unseen data windows, random baselines, prop-firm drawdown rules. It cannot see next month's regime. A high score means the edge wasn't an artifact of one lucky sequence; it is not a profit guarantee, and we will never market it as one.

Question 7

What happens when a component can't be computed?

Accepted Answer

The score is marked as degraded and lists exactly which components were missing, rather than silently filling the gap with an optimistic default. You should know when you're looking at a partial picture.

Question 8

How does the score change when I pick a prop firm?

Accepted Answer

The drawdown component is re-evaluated against that firm's actual dollar limits. A strategy whose historical drawdown blows through the firm's trailing limit gets that component zeroed — a strategy that would have failed the account shouldn't score like one that survived.

Question 9

Can I export strategies to TradingView?

Accepted Answer

Yes — Builder strategies export as Pine Script v6, configured to fill at next bar open so the Pine matches the engine's execution semantics rather than silently using a different fill model.

Question 10

Does the exported Pine match Strata's results exactly?

Accepted Answer

Our parity standard is net P&L within 5% and trade count within ±2 on the same date range. As of June 5, 2026, the real-data engine-vs-generated-Pine sweep verified 228 of 349 launch-ready signals, or 65.3%. Signals that have not cleared that gate are fail-closed for Pine export rather than presented as verified. Residual differences can also come from data-feed differences between Databento and TradingView's feed.

Question 11

Why isn't parity 100%?

Accepted Answer

Some indicator math has no exact Pine built-in — certain regression and smoothing variants differ between our engine, TA-Lib, and Pine's ta.* functions. Where the translation isn't exact yet, we'd rather tell you than round up. The verified share is tracked per signal family and grows as families clear the gate.

Question 12

Which firms does the validator cover?

Accepted Answer

Six today: Apex Trader Funding, TopStep, Tradeify, Lucid Trading, MyFundedFutures, and Alpha Futures, at the common 25K–150K account sizes. Each rule set encodes the firm's drawdown type and calculation (end-of-day trailing vs intraday, lock behavior), daily loss limits, profit targets, minimum trading days, and payout-relevant consistency rules.

Question 13

Prop firms change their rules constantly. How current are yours?

Accepted Answer

Every rule set carries the official source URLs it was verified against, and rules are re-checked against the firms' published pages — most recently June 2026. Where a firm's own pages disagree with each other, the rule set carries an explicit review flag instead of a silently picked number. If you spot a rule that's drifted, email us; that's a bug, not a shrug.

Question 14

What does the validator actually test?

Accepted Answer

It runs your strategy's trade history against the firm's encoded rules — trailing or end-of-day drawdown breaches, daily loss limit hits, profit-target progress — and reports survival across Monte Carlo reshuffles of the trade sequence, not just the single historical path. One lucky ordering shouldn't be the difference between passed and blown.

Question 15

My firm isn't listed. Can I still use Strata?

Accepted Answer

Yes — everything except the firm-specific pass/fail simulation works regardless of firm. We add firms as we can verify their published rules properly; we'd rather cover six firms correctly than twenty approximately.

Question 16

Is there a free trial?

Accepted Answer

Your first three backtests run on us — no card required to see real output. Paid plans are Pro ($49/mo), Elite ($149/mo), and Vault ($299/mo), with two months free on annual billing.

Question 17

What's your refund policy?

Accepted Answer

Subscriptions renew automatically and you can cancel any time — access continues through the end of the billing period. Refund terms for your plan are stated at checkout before you pay. If something's broken on our end, email hello@strataalgo.com and we'll make it right.

Question 18

Do you guarantee results or funded-account passes?

Accepted Answer

No, and we never will. Backtest results do not guarantee future returns, a high Strata Score is not a promise, and any tool that guarantees you'll pass a prop-firm evaluation is lying to you. What we guarantee is the honesty of the testing: real data, conservative fills, and numbers we don't round up.

Question 19

Who owns my strategies and data?

Accepted Answer

You do, always. We don't train models on your strategies, your account data is isolated, and you can export everything you've built at any time.

Straight answers, including the inconvenient ones.

The engine

The Strata Score

Pine export

Prop-firm validator

Plans, billing, and trust