The chart in the Test view is the run. Candlesticks, the trades the strategy took, and the indicators it declared all appear on it once the run completes. Before that it is empty on purpose: a chart of prices with no result on it invites you to read a strategy into the shape.

The bar over the chart

Once a run has a result, a thin bar sits over the chart.

Chart layers shows All, Price, Equity or Drawdown: the price with its trades, the equity curve, the drawdown, or all three stacked on one time axis.

Chart options holds the chart type (candles, hollow candles, Heikin Ashi, bars, a line, a step line, a line with markers, an area, a baseline or columns), the Trade side filter and, on the equity layer, the Benchmark. Candles are the default because a fill argument is usually an argument about a wick. The trade side filter shows all trades, only the longs, or only the shorts, which helps when a strategy is profitable overall and one direction is carrying it. The benchmark paints Buy and Hold across the same period, or None. It is the comparison a return has to beat before it means anything. A strategy that returns eight percent on an instrument that rose twelve has lost to doing nothing.

Range jumps the visible window to 1W, 1M, 3M, 1Y or All. Zoom in, Zoom out and Fit change the zoom, and Fit shows everything the run produced. The fullscreen button hands the whole window to the chart. None of it changes the run.

Moving around the chart

Drag the chart to pan it. The mouse wheel zooms. Drag an axis to scale it, and double click the axis to reset it. That holds for the price scale and for the time axis.

Chart settings

How the chart looks lives in one place, the Chart settings dialog. Open it with the gear in the corner of the chart, where the price scale meets the time axis, or with Open on the Chart settings row under Settings, Appearance. Chart colours are set there and nowhere else. Colours you leave alone follow the colour scheme.

Symbol: the chart type, the colours of the up and down bodies, borders and wicks, the line and area colours, and the decimals.
Status line: what the line at the top of the chart shows. Symbol and timeframe, open, high, low and close, the change on the previous close, the volume and the indicator values, each on or off.
Scales: the side of the price scale, the scale mode (Regular, Logarithmic, Percent or Indexed to 100), auto scale, invert, the margins, the last price on the scale and its line, and the colour of the scale lines.
Canvas: the background, solid or a gradient, the vertical and horizontal grid lines, the crosshair (Free, Magnet or Hidden) with its colour and style, a watermark, and the text colour and size.
Trading: the trade markers, the lines from entry to exit, the stop and target lines and their colours for long, short, exit, win, loss, stop and target, and the colours of the equity curve, the Buy and Hold line and the drawdown.
Templates: save what you changed as a template, apply, rename or delete one, or Reset to scheme default.

A change shows on the chart at once. OK keeps it, and closing the dialog with Escape puts back what it was when you opened it.

Drawing on the chart

The drawing tools sit in the bar over the chart, on the price layer.

Trendline: click once where it starts, once where it ends.
Horizontal level: click where it goes.

Click a drawing to select it. Delete removes the selected one, and Clear removes every drawing on this instrument and this timeframe.

Drawings are filed under the instrument and the timeframe together, so a trendline on EURUSD M15 is not a trendline on EURUSD H1 and not one on GBPUSD M15 either. They survive a reload, and they are yours: nothing is uploaded and nothing about them reaches the engine. A drawing is a note to yourself about a chart, not an input to a run.

Replaying a run

A run carries step data when Visual is chosen on the run bar before it starts, and the engine then records every bar. Fast, the default, sends the result alone. The frames come from the engine on this machine, so a server run has none.

As soon as Visual is chosen, Speed shows above the chart (1x, 10x, 100x, 1000x or Max, 10x by default). Set it before the run: the run plays at that speed when its frames arrive. After Exit replay, Replay in the same strip brings the replay back.

Once a run carries step data, the strip walks it bar by bar: Play, Pause, Step forward, Restart and Exit replay, with the bar counter beside them. Space plays and pauses, Right Arrow steps, both held off while a text field has focus.

A grid bot, the lot doubling hedge, a C# robot that places its own orders and a portfolio record no frames: they hold several positions or instruments at once, and the replay follows one. A visual run of one of them shows whole, and the strip says it sent no frames.

Replay is how you find out what a strategy actually did at the moment it went wrong. The equity curve tells you that a week was bad. The replay tells you it was one position held through a gap.

The live chart

A deployment's page under Live opens on its price chart, for a Live Test or Live Deploy on this machine and for a deployment on our server alike. The candles are the closed bars the deployment itself watches, on its instrument and timeframe, the bars its signals are decided on, and the bars it warmed up on are there from the start. An arrow marks each entry, a dot each exit, and the open position carries its stop and target with their prices on the scale. As bars arrive the chart keeps your zoom. Follow latest keeps the newest bar in view; scroll back and it turns off, so a new bar never pulls you away from what you are reading. When the prices stop arriving, the last bars stay, the age of the last one is shown with Prices not live, and nothing is filled in. The simulated equity has its own chart below it. The Chart settings are the ones described above.

Exporting the chart

The report exports carry the numbers, not the picture. See Backtesting for the CSV and JSON exports, which start on Pro, and the report, which every plan exports.