Trading Metrics that Actually Matter

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Traders love their performance metrics. Anyone who’s used their platform’s backtesting features has probably come across a few dozen of them, and everyone’s got their favorite. Anybody who’s anybody in the finance world has one named after them: Sharpe, Sortino, Calmar, Treynor, Gartman, etc. (OK, maybe not the last one). But which ones are the most important? There should be some kind of objective answer to this, right? If you look for the answer to this question on Google, you’ll be quickly overwhelmed. Most people want to give you 5+ different metrics you should be focusing on, all at once. But they can’t all be equally important; what we really want is a fitness function, or one statistic that can be optimized to compare all strategies against one another.

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