Backtest and Investment Analysis Tool Disclosure
Research and Analytics Only
Strategy Lab is an interactive research and analytics tool. It is not a broker, investment adviser, custodian, trading venue, or tax adviser. Platform output is not individualized investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or an offer to provide investment advisory services.
All screens, model rankings, holdings, rebalance histories, strategy blends, and signal outputs are user-directed research artifacts. Any decision to trade, allocate, recommend, publish, or present a strategy is solely the user's responsibility and should be reviewed by qualified investment, legal, tax, and compliance professionals.
Important Risk Statements
- Investing in securities involves risk, including possible loss of principal.
- Past performance, including hypothetical and backtested performance, is not a guarantee or reliable indicator of future results.
- Examples, screenshots, saved screens, exports, and sample strategies are for illustrative research purposes only and are not recommendations, offers, or solicitations.
- Securities products are not FDIC insured, are not bank guaranteed, and may lose value.
- Charts and graphs are provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied on as the sole basis for an investment decision.
Hypothetical Performance
Backtested performance applies user-selected rules to historical data. It was not achieved by an actual account unless separately documented outside the platform. Hypothetical results can differ materially from live results because they do not capture every real-world constraint, including liquidity, taxes, changing borrow availability, market impact, rejected orders, account restrictions, operational errors, investor behavior, or strategy changes after reviewing results.
Hypothetical performance can be especially sensitive to hindsight, data-mining, optimization choices, survivorship assumptions, universe construction, factor definitions, rebalance timing, holding-count limits, and the date range selected. A strategy that looked strong in one historical period may fail in another period or in live trading.
Methodology and Assumptions
- Strategies use the dates, universes, filters, rankings, rebalance frequency, holding count, weighting method, benchmark, and cost assumptions selected by the user.
- Where available, the platform uses point-in-time security membership and fundamental data to reduce look-ahead and survivorship bias. No data process can eliminate every vendor revision, symbol-mapping issue, stale field, or historical-data error.
- Default results are model results. They may include user-specified commissions, slippage, and rebalancing assumptions, but they do not automatically include advisory fees, fund expense ratios beyond price/total-return data, taxes, spread costs, market impact, or custody fees unless specifically modeled.
- Ranked screens can favor securities with particular historical characteristics because the user selects the universe, signals, directions, lookbacks, gates, and optimization criteria.
- Some calculations depend on adjusted historical prices and trailing financial statement data. Corporate actions, restatements, mergers, ticker changes, special distributions, and data-provider methodology changes can affect results.
- Results may vary with each use and over time as market data, point-in-time datasets, security mappings, user settings, and platform methodology are updated.
- Other securities or funds not included in a selected universe may have characteristics similar or superior to those selected by a screen.
Risk and Limitations
- High historical returns, Sortino, Sharpe, Calmar, Tri-Score, win rates, or low drawdowns may be the result of overfitting, data-mining, lucky market regimes, or concentrated exposure.
- Small sample sizes, limited trade counts, narrow universes, aggressive filters, and short lookback periods can make results unstable.
- Dividend yield, valuation, growth, ownership, insider, technical, volatility, and event-based metrics can be stale, incomplete, or calculated differently by other services.
- Benchmark comparisons may differ from other platforms because of data source, dividend treatment, expense treatment, start date, holidays, rebalance timing, and rounding.
- Strategy concentration, leverage, short exposure, options exposure, illiquidity, high turnover, taxes, and transaction costs can materially reduce or reverse modeled results.
- Outputs speak only as of the date generated and may change without notice.
Third-Party Data
Market, corporate-action, holdings, ownership, event, and fundamentals data may be obtained from third-party sources believed to be useful for research. Strategy Lab does not independently verify every datapoint and makes no representation that any source is complete, accurate, timely, or appropriate for any particular use. Data can be delayed, corrected, restated, stale, missing, or subject to provider methodology changes.
Costs, Taxes, and Execution
Unless a user explicitly models them, results do not include all commissions, bid-ask spreads, advisory fees, management fees, taxes, margin costs, borrow costs, financing costs, short-sale constraints, options assignment/exercise outcomes, market impact, order-routing differences, liquidity constraints, partial fills, or account-level restrictions. Live execution can differ materially from a backtest because historical closing prices may not be available in actual trading.
Exports and Client Use
CSV exports, saved screens, screenshots, and reports are intended for internal research, reconciliation, and independent review. They should not be presented as actual performance, guaranteed outcomes, regulatory-approved materials, or personalized recommendations. Users, advisors, broker-dealers, and firms are responsible for adding required disclosures, retaining books and records, validating methodology, and obtaining any required supervisory or compliance approval before external or client-facing use.
Options and Short-Horizon Signal Research
Options-related signal research is hypothetical and does not price actual option contracts unless separately documented. Options involve significant risk and are not appropriate for all investors. Long options can expire worthless, and some options strategies can involve losses greater than the original investment. Before trading options, investors should read the Options Clearing Corporation's Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options.
Professional and Firm Review
- Registered investment advisers, broker-dealers, investment adviser representatives, registered representatives, and other professionals remain responsible for their own fiduciary, suitability, best-interest, advertising, supervision, recordkeeping, and client-communication obligations.
- Strategy Lab does not determine whether a strategy is suitable, prudent, diversified, tax-efficient, or appropriate for any person or account.
- Any firm using Strategy Lab in a regulated workflow should maintain written policies governing hypothetical performance, investment analysis tools, model approvals, client presentation, and export retention.
Regulatory Review Notes
This disclosure is designed to support review under investment-analysis-tool and hypothetical-performance principles, including methodology, limitation, universe, selectivity, and hypothetical-result disclosures. Relevant public references include the SEC investment adviser marketing rule, SEC Marketing Compliance FAQs, and FINRA Rule 2214. Firms remain responsible for their own compliance review, books and records, client communications, and suitability or fiduciary obligations.
Third-Party Marks
Third-party company names, fund names, ticker symbols, logos, and trademarks belong to their respective owners. References to securities, funds, benchmarks, indexes, or third-party services do not imply sponsorship, approval, endorsement, partnership, or affiliation.
Contact
Questions about these disclosures can be sent to [email protected].