APEX Start — Learn to read the market

59 Performance Lab metrics

You can see what all of them are called. The explanation for each one — what it says, where it comes from and what it's for — opens up with your account connected, along with the metric running on your own trades. The 17 basic terms above are open to everyone.

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Basics

The terms that come up most when someone is just starting to trade.

Leverage: Capital lent by the broker that multiplies the size of your position, and with it, both your gains and your losses.
Margin: The equity the broker requires you to maintain to keep a leveraged position open.
Spread: The difference between an instrument's buy price and sell price; it's one of the costs of trading.
Pip: The smallest unit of price movement in the currency (forex) market.
Lot: The standard unit of trade size; it defines how much each price movement is worth in real money.
Drawdown: The drop in an account from its highest point to a subsequent lower point.
Stop loss: An order that automatically closes a losing trade once it reaches a set price, to limit the loss.
Take profit: An order that automatically closes a winning trade once it reaches a set price, locking in the gain.
Swap: The cost (or income) of holding a position open overnight.
Volatility: How much and how fast an instrument's price moves over a period of time.
Liquidity: How easily an instrument can be bought or sold without significantly affecting its price.
Slippage: The difference between the price at which you expected to enter or exit a trade and the price at which it actually executed.
Percentile: Where today's figure lands compared with its own history. Being in the 80th percentile means today was equal to or higher than 80% of previous days — it doesn't say whether that's good or bad, only how common or unusual it is.
Correlation: How closely two instruments move together. Close to +1: they tend to move together in the same direction. Close to −1: in opposite directions. Close to 0: no apparent relationship between them.
Relative volatility: How much one instrument moves compared with another. If one has 1.4x the volatility of the other, its movements tend to be 40% bigger — this is a different question from correlation: two instruments can move very much in sync and still have one move much more than the other.
Volatility regime: Whether an instrument is coming out of a more volatile or calmer period than its own recent historical average.
Divergence: When an instrument moved differently from what its historical relationship with another instrument would predict — not that the two moved differently from each other, but that one departed from its usual pattern relative to the other.

Result

13 with your demo

How much you made or lost, and how repeatable it is. Every number here comes from CLOSED trades: an open position doesn't count until it closes.

Net P&L Period or history, depending on where you see it: With your account connected
Win rate Period or history, depending on where you see it: With your account connected
Profit factor Period or history, depending on where you see it: With your account connected
Expectancy / trade Period or history, depending on where you see it: With your account connected
Payoff (actual R:R) Period or history, depending on where you see it: With your account connected
Recovery factor Period or history, depending on where you see it: With your account connected
Max consecutive streak Period or history, depending on where you see it: With your account connected
Costs (commission + swap) Period or history, depending on where you see it: With your account connected
Return on your trading For the period: With your account connected
Annualized Sharpe For the period: With your account connected
Annualized Sortino For the period: With your account connected
Consistency index For the period: With your account connected
Green days · Green months For the period: With your account connected

Trades

3 with your demo

The only section that doesn't speak in averages: every trade, one at a time. You read it by tapping a row in the table — ALWAYS across your full history, with no period selector.

Against you (MAE) Your entire history: With your account connected
In your favor (MFE) Your entire history: With your account connected
R-multiple Your entire history: With your account connected

Risk

7 with your demo

How much you can lose, and how much you lost at the worst moment. Watch the window: CURRENT drawdown always covers the whole account, because "how far am I from my best moment" doesn't depend on which period you're looking at.

Max drawdown (worst dip) Period or history, depending on where you see it: With your account connected
Worst drop in your trading Your entire history: With your account connected
Current drawdown Your entire history: With your account connected
Worst day · Max daily loss For the period: With your account connected
Position-size consistency by instrument Your entire history: With your account connected
Dispersion: risk vs. outcome Your entire history: With your account connected
Cost drag Your entire history: With your account connected

Performance

6 with your demo

How much you made and when. This is where your equity curve lives, and it always covers your full history — a curve cropped to the period hides where you were coming from.

Your equity curve Your entire history: With your account connected
How much of your result rides on a few trades Your entire history: With your account connected
Outcome distribution Your entire history: With your account connected
R-multiple distribution Your entire history: With your account connected
Monthly P&L Your entire history: With your account connected
Cash movements Your entire history: With your account connected

Instruments

3 with your demo

Where you win and where you lose. This section ALWAYS covers your full history: a breakdown by instrument over five trades tells you nothing, so it has no period selector.

By instrument Your entire history: With your account connected
Where you win and where you lose (buckets) Your entire history: With your account connected
Average lot size by instrument Your entire history: With your account connected

Mind

12 with your demo

Why you trade the way you trade. Everything in this section is A READING OF YOUR DATA, not a psychological diagnosis: every line is a count over real trades and none of them claims to know why you did it. It also always runs on your full history — a revenge detector over one week detects noise, not revenge.

Discipline score Your entire history: With your account connected
Overall rule adherence Your entire history: With your account connected
Cost of breaking your rules Your entire history: With your account connected
Out-of-scale trades Your entire history: With your account connected
Your current bar (% of capital) Your entire history: With your account connected
How you react after a loss Your entire history: With your account connected
What you do after a win (house money effect) Your entire history: With your account connected
Overtrading Your entire history: With your account connected
At which trade of the day do you stop making money? Your entire history: With your account connected
Fatigue map (P&L by hour × day) Your entire history: With your account connected
Are you improving? Your entire history: With your account connected
Against what you said you'd do Your entire history: With your account connected

Rules and periods

6 with your demo

How the Lab decides what gets measured, and what it gets measured against.

Market day: With your account connected
Selected period: With your account connected
Score by period (global thresholds): With your account connected
Minimum sample sizes: With your account connected
Your own rules vs. template: With your account connected
Live data / read-only: With your account connected

Volatility

7 with your demo

The movement budget the market is pricing in for today, translated into points. It's the ONLY part of APEX that looks forward: everything else describes what already happened. And for that very reason it's the easiest one to misread — nothing here is a hard line the price has to respect.

Daily range band: With your account connected
Measured coverage: With your account connected
Typical range: With your account connected
Implied vs. realized: With your account connected
Opening gap risk: With your account connected
Own scale · VIX pace: With your account connected
Statistical support, not a hard line: With your account connected

Context

2 with your demo

How much an instrument usually moves in this time window, compared with its own minute-by-minute history. It measures HOW MUCH, never which way: nothing here says whether price will go up or down.

Day curve: With your account connected
Remaining travel: With your account connected

Educational content. Not personalized financial advice. Trading in the markets carries a risk of capital loss.

Somos APEX LLC · A U.S. company (Wyoming)