What file does it take?
A TradingView Strategy Tester Excel (.xlsx) export. In the Strategy Tester, open the ⋯ menu (top-right) and choose Export → Excel. The symbol is auto-detected from the file's Properties sheet, and you can load multiple files at once to build a portfolio view.
Is my backtest data uploaded anywhere?
No. Every metric, chart and table is computed locally in your browser, and your files never leave your machine. The only server involved is the sign-in gate — it authenticates you, but never receives your trade data.
How are commissions handled?
Set a single round-trip cost and every net figure — Net P&L, profit factor, expectancy, Sharpe — is computed after fees. Leave it blank to see gross P&L.
What metrics does it compute?
The headline set — net & gross P&L, win rate, profit factor, expectancy, average win/loss, best/worst trade, max drawdown ($ and %), annualized Sharpe, days underwater — at the portfolio level, per symbol and per weekday, with a full drawdowns table. Plus the risk-adjusted and tail metrics a desk uses: Sortino, Calmar/MAR, recovery factor, Ulcer index, VaR & CVaR, tail ratio, max consecutive wins/losses, SQN and Kelly %.
How do I know my edge is real and not curve-fit?
That's what the trust engine is for. The Probabilistic & Deflated Sharpe estimate the odds your true Sharpe is genuinely above zero — Deflated discounting for how many strategy variants you tried and how short the sample is. The out-of-sample holdout hides the tail of your history and checks the edge still holds there. And Monte Carlo reshuffles your trades ~1,000× so you're judging a distribution of outcomes, not one lucky ordering.
What are Monte Carlo and "risk of ruin"?
Your backtest is one path. Monte Carlo resamples and reshuffles your trade sequence about a thousand times to build a cone of possible equity curves — so instead of a single max drawdown you get the 95th-percentile drawdown, and a risk of ruin: the share of simulations that would have blown up your account at its current size.
Does it do walk-forward optimization?
Honestly, no — and nothing that only reads a trade export can. True walk-forward re-optimizes a strategy's parameters out of sample, which needs the strategy engine itself. What tradechef does is an out-of-sample holdout: a chronological in-sample vs held-out split with a side-by-side consistency check. Very useful, and we call it what it is rather than overselling it.
How should I size the strategy?
The position-sizing lab re-runs your trades under Kelly, fractional-Kelly, fixed-fractional or volatility-target sizing and redraws the equity curve against your original fixed-qty run, so you can see what bigger size buys in return versus what it costs in drawdown and ruin risk. Since TradingView trades are fixed-qty, re-sizing scales each trade's P&L by a multiplier off running equity — an approximation, and labelled as one.
Can I test "what if I skipped Mondays / FOMC / big-loss days"?
Yes — that's the scenario engine. Toggle FOMC skip, exclude weekdays or months, filter by direction or entry time, and simulate daily/weekly loss limits. Filters apply at the trade level, so every metric and chart reconciles cleanly and instantly.
Can I compare two strategies or parameter sets?
Compare mode overlays two backtests' equity curves and stacks their monthly and day-of-week P&L so you can see exactly what a change bought you.
How much does it cost?
It's free to use right now — sign in, drop in a file, no card and no trial timer.