The Performance overview shows an account equity line that ends at $51,712 with a net figure of +396.07% printed above it, and in the same header strip a profit factor of 0.08 and an expectancy of -1.20% across 87 trades. The line goes up and to the right. The trade statistics say the trading lost money. Both readings are of the same account on the same day.
This is the single most common way a retail trader talks themselves into sizing up. The balance chart is the panel that feels like the truth, because it is the number in your account, and the closed-trade statistics feel like accounting detail. It is the other way round. The balance is the panel with the most things in it that are not your trading.
What a balance line contains that a trade record does not
The equity panel labels itself, and the label is the whole story. It says it is the real cumulative balance summed across your connected accounts. A balance is a level. It moves for any reason a level can move, and there are three big ones that have nothing to do with a winning trade.
The first is money you added. A transfer in raises the line permanently and raises every percentage figure computed off that line from that point on. It does not appear in the trade list, because it is not a trade.
The second is unrealised marks. An open position that has moved in your favour lifts the balance today and appears in no closed-trade statistic, because the trade has not closed. Profit factor, expectancy and win rate are all computed on trades that finished. A big open winner and a big open loser both sit in the balance and in neither of the tiles.
The third is credits that are not trades at all. Interest, staking rewards, rebates, referral credits, assets that arrived without being bought. Small individually, and they accumulate quietly in the direction that makes you feel good.
Look at the shape in the screenshot rather than the direction. A trading account that is compounding produces a jagged drift. This line steps. It jumps in blocks through December and January, drops in blocks through February, and then goes flat for roughly six months. Flat is the interesting part, because the monthly returns table on the Distributions tab reads April -0.4%, May -20.5%, June -8.1% and July -16.8% over that same stretch. Those two panels are describing the same months and pointing in different directions, and the resolution is in the export rather than in choosing the panel you prefer.
Reading profit factor and expectancy for what they actually claim
Profit factor is gross profit divided by gross loss over the closed trades in scope. At 1.0 the winners and losers cancel before costs. Below 1.0 the losers are larger in aggregate. A reading of 0.08 says gross losses were more than ten times gross profits across those 87 trades. That is not a marginal figure that better execution fixes.
Expectancy of -1.20% is the average outcome per trade in percentage terms, and win rate of 25.29% says roughly one trade in four finished green. Those three tiles agree with each other and they agree with the direction tables lower down, where the long bucket reads 73 trades for -44.64% and the short bucket 14 trades for -1.18%, and with the venue table, where Hyperliquid reads 70 trades at a 21.4% win rate for -37.79%.
That internal agreement is what makes the trade statistics the stronger evidence here. Five separate panels computed from counts and sums say the same thing. One panel computed from a balance says something else, and it is the panel with the deposits in it.
Separating the three stories in about ten minutes
You do not need a spreadsheet model. You need four passes over the export, and the page has an export button in the top right.
- Find every vertical step in the balance line and check the date against your trade list. A step on a day with no closing trade is a flow or a credit. A step on a day with several closes is trading. This one check settles most of the question on most accounts.
- Total the deposits and withdrawals over the window and subtract the net from the balance change. What is left is the part your trading and your open marks are responsible for. If that residual is negative while the line rose, you have your answer.
- Separate realised from unrealised. Sum the closed-trade P&L in currency. If the balance change less flows is materially better than that sum, the difference is sitting in open positions and it is not yours until it closes.
- Compare the monthly table to the balance change month by month. Where they disagree, look at that month specifically rather than arguing about the whole window.
Do all four with one scope selected and one timeframe selected, and write both down. The account row at the top of the page offers all accounts, Blockcircle only, autopilot, MTE, paper, manual and wallet, plus a dropdown for individual accounts. Every panel on the page responds to those buttons, so a comparison across two panels is only valid if both were read under the same settings.
The test I run before I trust an equity chart
One line. If I cannot state the net external flow over the window, the chart is not evidence about my trading and I do not quote it, to myself or to anyone else.
That sounds severe and it is cheap in practice, because the flow number is a single figure you can look up once a month and write down. The reason to be severe is that the failure mode is not a mistaken belief, it is a sizing decision made on the mistaken belief. Nobody loses money by thinking their equity curve looks good. They lose it by doubling position size because it looked good, on a strategy whose profit factor was telling them the opposite the whole time.
When the trade statistics are the ones that mislead
The direction of this article should not become a rule that closed-trade statistics always win. They have their own blind spots, and three of them show up on this very page.
They ignore open positions entirely, so a strategy that holds winners for months and closes losers quickly will show a terrible profit factor for as long as the winners stay open. They are unweighted by size, so a percentage expectancy treats a small trade and a large one identically, which is why the currency version is worth computing separately. And they can be thin on data you assume is there. On this account the Distributions tab shows the hold time histogram with n equal to zero, and the excursion histograms empty with a note that maximum favourable and adverse excursion are only recorded on paper trades.
So the honest position is that the balance line and the trade statistics answer different questions and you need both. The balance answers what is in the account. The trade statistics answer whether the decisions were any good. Sizing up is only justified by the second one, and on this capture the second one reads 0.08.