Glossary

Definitions for common backtesting and Pine Script terms.

B

Backtest
Running a trading strategy against historical market data to evaluate its performance.
Buy and Hold
A benchmark strategy of buying an asset at the start and holding it for the entire backtest period.

C

Candlestick
A price bar showing the open, high, low, and close (OHLC) values for a specific time period.

D

Drawdown
The peak-to-trough decline in portfolio value during a backtest, often expressed as a percentage.

E

Equity Curve
A chart showing how a strategy's portfolio value changes over time during a backtest.

O

Overfitting
When a strategy is tuned to match historical noise rather than a genuine market pattern.

P

Parameter Sweep
Testing a strategy across a range of input values to compare how performance varies with different settings.
Pine Script
A domain-specific programming language created by TradingView for writing trading indicators and strategies.

W

Win Rate
The percentage of trades in a backtest that were profitable.