Dashboard guide
Every number, explained
What each statistic on your dashboard measures, exactly how Candela works it out, and what to do about it. No jargon left undefined.
How to read this
Every figure on the dashboard comes from trades you have closed — nothing is estimated, sampled or filled in. Open positions are excluded until they have an outcome, so a number only moves when something actually finished.
Candela is a per-account journal: every figure describes ONE trading account, in that account's own currency, and should match that broker's statement. The picker at the top right chooses the account; there is deliberately no combined view, because money in different currencies doesn't add and blended accounts stop describing your decisions.
Everything also respects the date range beside it. Change either control and every card recomputes. If a figure disagrees with your broker, the range is almost always the reason.
Days are grouped in your own timezone, which you can change in Preferences. Trades are dated by when they closed, not when they opened.
The four headline numbers
The row across the top of your dashboard. Each one compares against the previous period of the same length, so a 30-day view is measured against the 30 days before it.
Net P&L
Everything the account's closed trades made or lost in the selected period, after fees — shown in the account's own currency.
- How it's worked out
- The sum of net profit and loss across every trade that closed inside the range. Open positions are excluded entirely — a trade only counts once it has an outcome. Fees and commissions are already deducted.
- How to read it
- This is the number the rest of the page explains, and it should reconcile with the account's broker statement. If it disagrees, check the date range first: your broker is usually showing account-to-date while Candela is showing the window you selected.
Trade win %
The share of your closed trades that ended positive.
- How it's worked out
- Winning trades divided by all closed trades. Break-even trades count in the denominator but not as wins, so they pull the percentage down.
- How to read it
- Half the story on its own. A 40% win rate with large winners beats 70% with large losers, every time. Always read it next to profit factor — one without the other tells you almost nothing.
Profit factor
How much you make for every unit you lose.
- How it's worked out
- Gross profit divided by gross loss. Both figures are absolute totals, so one enormous winner can carry it — which is why consistency is scored separately.
- How to read it
- Above 1.0 you are net profitable. 1.5 and up is a genuine edge. ∞ means you had no losing trades in the period, which almost always means the sample is too small to trust.
Max drawdown
The deepest peak-to-valley fall in your equity for the period.
- How it's worked out
- Peak to valley on your equity curve, with deposits and withdrawals taken out. Each cash flow ends one stretch and starts the next, so paying money into a losing run cannot shrink the number — only trading moves it. The figure in currency is the fall from your high-water mark; the percentage is that fall as a share of the peak it fell from.
- How to read it
- The most giving-back you actually sat through. Smaller is better. This is the number that decides whether you can hold a position without your judgement going with it — and the one prop firms fail people on.
The equity curve
Your closed trades in the order they happened, totalled as they go.
Equity curve · last 30 days
+$5,819.10
Equity curve
Your running profit and loss, trade by trade.
- How it's worked out
- Every closed trade in the period, sorted by close time, added cumulatively. The x-axis is trade order rather than calendar time, so a busy day takes more width than a quiet week.
- How to read it
- Look at the shape, not the endpoint. A staircase means a repeatable process. A flat line with one cliff means a single trade is doing the work. A deep valley that recovers tells you what your drawdown tolerance actually is.
Net daily P&L
One bar per day you traded, green above the line and red below.
Net daily P&L · last 30 days
+$290.96
average trading day
20 trading days · 11 green · 9 red
Net daily P&L
What each trading day finished at, and how the days compare.
- How it's worked out
- Trades are grouped by the calendar day they closed, in your timezone, and netted. Days you did not trade are left out rather than drawn flat, so weekends and rest days don't stretch the chart into empty space.
- How to read it
- The headline is your average trading day, not the period total — the total is already in Net P&L above. Watch the balance of green to red days and the size of the red ones. Frequent small reds among larger greens is a healthy pattern; one red the size of five greens is a risk problem, not a strategy problem.
How every number is made
Every figure on the dashboard, with the arithmetic that produces it and the fields it is read from. The worked examples are not typed out — they are the real functions run on the example book above, so this page cannot quote a number the code has stopped producing.
Two conventions are worth knowing, because tools disagree about both. A trade is one netted position, not one fill, so a position closed in three parts counts once. And the daily series covers every business day since the account was funded, counting an idle day as 0% — a day holding nothing is a real observation of no risk taken, and leaving it out roughly doubles every ratio built on top.
What happened
Trades
count(positions where net_pnl is set)
- Reads
- positions
- Worked on the example book
- 80 closed
Volume
sum(size)
- Reads
- size
- Worked on the example book
- 113.14 lots
Time in market
sum(closed_at - opened_at)
- Reads
- opened_at, closed_at
- Worked on the example book
- 5d 15h
Exposure
time in market / (last close - first open)
- Reads
- opened_at, closed_at
- Worked on the example book
- 4.3%
Mind Score
weighted blend over last 30 days: consistency 30, sleep 25, calm 20, energy 15, routine 10; unlocks at 10 journaled days
- Reads
- daily_checkins (sleep, quality, stress, energy, exercise, meals)
- Worked on the example book
- consistency 80, sleep 74, calm 65, energy 70, routine 50 -> 71
Mind vs market
avg(day net P&L) per bucket; a day joins a bucket by its check-in answer; both buckets need >= 5 days
- Reads
- net_pnl by local day, daily_checkins (sleep, stress, exercise)
- Worked on the example book
- 8 rested days avg +$120/day vs 6 short-sleep days avg -$45/day
The money
Net P&L
sum(net_pnl)
- Reads
- net_pnl (profit + commission + swap + fees)
- Worked on the example book
- 5,819.10
Monthly return
prod(1 + daily r in month) - 1; the year is prod(1 + monthly) - 1
- Reads
- net_pnl, deposits & withdrawals
- Worked on the example book
- +10.00% then +9.09% -> 1.10 x 1.0909 - 1 = +20.00%
Win rate
winners / closed x 100
- Reads
- net_pnl
- Worked on the example book
- 38 / 80 x 100 = 47.50%
Profit factor
sum(winners) / |sum(losers)|
- Reads
- net_pnl
- Worked on the example book
- 17,029.19 / 11,210.09 = 1.52
Expectancy
win rate x avg win + loss rate x avg loss
- Reads
- net_pnl
- Worked on the example book
- 0.475 x 448.14 + 0.525 x -266.91 = 72.74
Avg win / avg loss
avg winner / |avg loser|
- Reads
- net_pnl
- Worked on the example book
- 448.14 / 266.91 = 1.68
Recovery factor
net profit / deepest money drawdown
- Reads
- net_pnl
- Worked on the example book
- 5,819.10 / 3,655.36 = 1.59
Consistency
best green day / sum of all green days x 100
- Reads
- net_pnl, closed_at, your timezone
- Worked on the example book
- 3,517.01 / 10,684.05 x 100 = 32.92%
Return and risk
Time-weighted return
product(1 + r_i) - 1, cut at every deposit and withdrawal
- Reads
- net_pnl, closed_at, account ledger
- Worked on the example book
- 29.10% across 106 days
Daily return series
one return per business day from funding, idle days = 0%
- Reads
- net_pnl, closed_at, account ledger
- Worked on the example book
- 106 days, of which 89 idle
Ann. volatility
stdev(r) x sqrt(252)
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- 0.01944 x 15.87 = 30.85%
Sharpe
mean(r) / stdev(r) x sqrt(252)
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- 0.00259 / 0.01944 x 15.87 = 2.11
Sortino
mean(r) / stdev(losing days only) x sqrt(252)
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- 0.00259 / 0.00789 x 15.87 = 5.21
Smart Sharpe
Sharpe / autocorrelation penalty
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- 2.11 -> 2.08 (Sortino 5.21 -> 5.13)
Calmar
annualised return / max drawdown
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- 83.52% / 13.41% = 10.91
VaR (95%)
the worst 5% of days, taken from history — no distribution assumed
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- worst 6 of 106 days -> -0.47%
cVaR (95%)
mean of every day at or beyond the VaR day
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- mean of those 6 = -2.35%
Skew
third standardised moment of r
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- 4.47
Kurtosis
fourth standardised moment of r, minus 3
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- 34.27
Curve linearity
r^2 of a straight line fitted to the compounding curve
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- 0.664
Drawdown
Max drawdown
max over t of (peak - index) / peak
- Reads
- net_pnl, closed_at, account ledger
- Worked on the example book
- 13.41%
Current drawdown
(peak - index now) / peak
- Reads
- net_pnl, closed_at, account ledger
- Worked on the example book
- 5.29%
Avg drawdown
mean depth of every fall below the high-water mark
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- 2.29%
Avg drawdown length
mean length of those falls, in days
- Reads
- daily return series
- Worked on the example book
- 9.6 days
The score
The Candela score
sum of (component / 100 x weight), over the six below
- Worked on the example book
- 8.8 + 8.7 + 11.9 + 4.8 + 13.7 + 10.2 = 58
Profit factor
clamp(0, 100, (value - 1) / (2.5 - 1) x 100)
- Reads
- profitFactor
- Worked on the example book
- 1.52 → 35/100 → 8.8 of 25 points
Win rate
clamp(0, 100, (value - 30) / (60 - 30) x 100)
- Reads
- winRate
- Worked on the example book
- 48% → 58/100 → 8.7 of 15 points
Avg win / avg loss
clamp(0, 100, (value - 0.5) / (2 - 0.5) x 100)
- Reads
- payoff
- Worked on the example book
- 1.68 → 79/100 → 11.9 of 15 points
Recovery factor
clamp(0, 100, (value - 0) / (5 - 0) x 100)
- Reads
- recovery
- Worked on the example book
- 1.59 → 32/100 → 4.8 of 15 points
Drawdown control
clamp(0, 100, (value - 50) / (10 - 50) x 100)
- Reads
- drawdown
- Worked on the example book
- 13% → 91/100 → 13.7 of 15 points
Consistency
clamp(0, 100, (value - 60) / (20 - 60) x 100)
- Reads
- consistency
- Worked on the example book
- 33% → 68/100 → 10.2 of 15 points
The Candela score
One 0–100 read on how you trade rather than how much you made. It is deliberately blind to position size, so a careful small account can outscore a reckless large one.
The six inputs
Each is scored 0–100 against a fixed band, then contributes its weight to the total. The weights add up to 100.
Profit factor
Scored 1.00 → 2.50 · worth 25 of 100 points
Add up every winning trade, add up every losing trade, divide the first by the second. At 1.0 you are exactly break-even before costs. Below 1.0 you are paying the market to trade. It carries the most weight of the six because it is the only one that accounts for both how often you win and how much you win by — the other five mostly explain WHY this number is what it is.
Win rate
Scored 30% → 60% · worth 15 of 100 points
The share of your closed trades that finished green. It is the most quoted number in trading and the most misleading on its own, which is why it is worth 15 points rather than 25. A 40% win rate with winners three times the size of your losers is a strong business; an 80% win rate with one catastrophic loser is not. Read it against avg win / avg loss, never alone.
Avg win / avg loss
Scored 0.50 → 2.00 · worth 15 of 100 points
Your average winning trade divided by your average losing trade, also called the payoff ratio. At 1.0 your winners and losers are the same size, so you need to win more than half the time to make anything. Above 1.0 you can be wrong more often than you are right and still finish ahead. This is the number that moves when you cut losers faster or let winners run.
Recovery factor
Scored 0.00 → 5.00 · worth 15 of 100 points
Net profit divided by your deepest drawdown. It answers a question raw profit cannot: what did that profit cost you in pain? Two traders can both finish the period up 5,000 — one never down more than 500, the other down 4,000 at the worst point. The first has a recovery factor of 10, the second 1.25. The first has a business, the second got lucky.
Drawdown control
Scored 50% → 10% given back · worth 15 of 100 points
Your deepest fall from a peak, measured as a share of that peak rather than in currency, so it means the same thing on a 1,000 account and a 100,000 one. If you built up to 4,000 and then fell to 3,000 before recovering, you gave back 25%. This is the metric prop firms fail people on, and the one that decides whether you can hold a position without your judgement going with it. Lower is better, so the band runs downward.
Consistency
Scored 60% → 20% from one day · worth 15 of 100 points
How much of your total profit came from your single best day. This is the prop-firm consistency rule, and it exists to catch a specific illusion: a month that looks profitable but is really one enormous day surrounded by mediocrity. If your best day is 60% of your profit, you do not have a repeatable edge yet — you have one good session and a lot of noise. Lower is better, so the band runs downward.
What the bands mean
- 85+Elite — Every part of this is working. Protect it.
- 70+Strong — A real edge, executed well. Keep the size honest.
- 55+Consistent — The edge is there. Your weakest metric is the one to work on.
- 40+Developing — Something works — it's being given back elsewhere.
- 0+Fragile — The maths isn't paying yet. Start with your lowest metric.
Why it stays hidden at first
The score does not appear until you have 20 closed trades in the selected range. A win rate over five trades is noise, and a confident-looking 90 built on noise is worse than no score at all.
Until then the radar still shows the six inputs so you can see what is being measured while the sample builds. Note that the score follows your date range — a seven-day view will rarely have enough trades to qualify.
What, when and where the money moves
Three cards that break the same P&L down by instrument, by session and by the tags you attach when journaling.
Instruments
What you trade
What you trade
Your trades split by instrument.
- How it's worked out
- Every trade in the period grouped by symbol, showing count and net P&L. The top five are listed individually and the rest collapse into 'Other'.
- How to read it
- Concentration is not automatically bad, but it should be deliberate. If most of your volume is in an instrument that isn't in your top earners, that gap is worth explaining.
Sessions
When you trade
When you trade
Your trades split by market session.
- How it's worked out
- Each trade is assigned to Asia, London, New York or After hours based on its OPEN time in your timezone. A trade opened in London and closed in New York counts as London.
- How to read it
- Most traders have one session that pays and one that quietly costs. If the busiest session isn't the one that pays best, you have found something to change this week.
Edges & leaks
Where the money moves
Setups paying you
Costing you
Edges & leaks
Which setups pay you, and which mistakes cost you.
- How it's worked out
- Setups come from the setup tag on each trade; leaks come from the mistake tags. Both are summed by net P&L, so a tag on many small trades can outrank a tag on one big one. Untagged trades appear in neither.
- How to read it
- This card is only as good as your tagging. If it looks empty or wrong, the fix is in how you journal, not in the numbers.
The journal itself
Two cards that measure the habit rather than the trading, and price what the habit is worth.
The ritual
Journal every trade
Journal every trade
The share of your trades in the period that have been journaled.
- How it's worked out
- Trades with a journal entry divided by all trades in the range. The target is 100% — this is a habit meter, not a performance one.
- How to read it
- Every other insight on this page degrades when this number drops. An unjournaled trade still counts in your P&L but contributes nothing to understanding why.
Psychology, priced
What your journal is worth
What your journal is worth
What following your plan, and your mood going in, are worth in money.
- How it's worked out
- Trades where you marked 'followed the plan' are netted against those where you didn't. The same is done for trades entered calm or steady versus anxious or tilted. Both comparisons need trades on each side to appear at all.
- How to read it
- This is the closest thing to a direct price on your discipline. If off-plan trades are net negative and on-plan trades are net positive, the gap between them is what your process is worth per period.
Execution
The numbers under the numbers — position sizing, holding times, streaks, and your two extreme days.
Execution
The numbers under the numbers
Trades
80
Volume
113.14
Time in market
5d 15h
Exposure
4.3%
Expectancy
+$72.74
Avg lot size
1.41
Biggest position
2.41
Avg hold
1h 41m
Fees paid
$253.63
Win streak / skid
4 / 11
Largest win
+$658.62
Largest loss
-$898.15
Avg win
+$448.14
Avg loss
-$266.91
Payoff ratio
1.68
Best day
12 trades · News Play · Supply & Demand · Oversized
Worst day
7 trades · News Play · Supply & Demand · Early exit
The execution grid
Position sizing, holding times, streaks, your average win and loss, and your two extreme days.
- How it's worked out
- All computed across closed trades in the period. Average hold is the mean time between open and close. Win streak / skid is the longest consecutive run of each, in close order. The two days at the foot of the card are the highest and lowest daily nets, with the setups and mistakes recorded on that day's trades.
- How to read it
- Look for mismatches. A largest position several times your average usually marks the trade that also produced your largest loss. A payoff ratio below 1.0 means you need to win more than half the time just to stand still. And compare the two days: if the best is far larger than everything around it, your consistency score will reflect that.
Risk
Everything here is built from one series: your return each day on the capital that was actually in the account that day. A deposit ends one measurement and starts the next, so paying money in cannot flatter a single figure below it.
Risk
What your returns look like day to day
Ann. volatility
30.85%
Sharpe
2.11
Sortino
5.21
Smart Sharpe
2.08
Smart Sortino
5.13
Calmar
10.91
VaR (95%)
-0.47%
cVaR (95%)
-2.35%
Current drawdown
5.29%
Avg drawdown
2.29%
Avg drawdown length
9.6d
Skew
4.47
Kurtosis
34.27
Curve linearity
0.664
Trading days measured: 106
Return per unit of risk
Annualised volatility, Sharpe, Sortino, their Smart variants and Calmar — five ways of asking what your profit cost you in risk.
- How it's worked out
- Volatility is the standard deviation of your daily returns, annualised over 252 trading days. Sharpe divides your mean daily return by it. Sortino divides by the deviation of the losing days only, on the grounds that upside movement is not risk. The Smart variants widen the denominator when your returns are autocorrelated — a run of days that follow one another is less independent evidence than its count suggests, so the ratio honestly shrinks. Calmar divides annualised return by your deepest drawdown.
- How to read it
- Sortino sitting above Sharpe means most of your volatility is upside, which is a good sign rather than a rounding error. A Smart figure well below its plain version means your results arrive in streaks, so the plain one is flattering you. Calmar answers the question a prop firm asks: what did you make relative to the worst hole you sat in? Under 60 trading days none of these appear, because a ratio built from a handful of days is a number rather than information. For scale: a Sharpe above 2 held over years is rare, and anything far higher usually means the sample is short rather than the trading exceptional.
Tails: VaR, cVaR, skew and kurtosis
How bad your bad days get, and whether the shape of your returns is hiding a rare disaster.
- How it's worked out
- VaR is the fifth-percentile day of your own history — no distribution is assumed, these are days that actually happened. cVaR is the mean of every day at or beyond it, which is what the tail costs once it arrives. Skew measures whether your returns lean positive or negative. Kurtosis measures how fat the tails are, where zero is a normal distribution and positive means extremes are more common than normal would predict.
- How to read it
- cVaR is always worse than VaR, and the gap between them is the point: VaR gives you the threshold, cVaR tells you what is waiting behind it. Negative skew with high kurtosis is the classic dangerous profile — many small wins and a rare large loss, the shape that makes an equity curve look wonderful right up until it does not. If that describes yours, the answer is in your stop discipline rather than your entries.
The shape of the curve
How deep your drawdowns usually run, how long they last, and how far below your high-water mark you are right now, and how straight your equity curve is.
- How it's worked out
- Every stretch where the curve sits below its own high-water mark counts as one drawdown episode. Average drawdown is the mean depth of those episodes; average length is their mean duration in trading days. Curve linearity is the r-squared of a straight line fitted to your compounding equity curve, from 0 to 1.
- How to read it
- Max drawdown tells you the worst thing that happened once; average drawdown tells you what normal feels like. The long episodes are the ones that break people — a deep fall recovered inside two days is far easier to sit through than a shallow one that grinds on for six weeks. Linearity near 1 means steady compounding; a low figure alongside good profit usually means a single trade carried the period.
The calendar
The month at a glance, coloured by each day's net result.
Calendar
Every day of the month with its net P&L and trade count.
- How it's worked out
- Days are grouped in your timezone by trade close time. Green and red shading is by direction only, not magnitude, so a small green day and a large one look the same. The month total sits above the grid.
- How to read it
- Use it for rhythm rather than size. Clusters of red often line up with a particular weekday or the days right after a big win — patterns that are invisible in a single total.
These statistics describe trades you have already closed. They are a record and a teaching tool, not a prediction and not advice — Candela does not recommend trades, forecast markets or tell you what to do next. Past performance says nothing about future results.
Something here still unclear? Visit the Help Centre.