Glossary

Every term the rest of the documentation assumes you already know, defined once. Where a word means something specific inside Quanify that it does not mean elsewhere in trading, the difference is called out.

Accounts and connections

Connection

One link between Quanify and one broker login. A connection is authentication, not an account — it is the credential, and it can hold many tradeable accounts underneath it. Adding a connection never arms anything.

Sub-account

One tradeable account underneath a connection. A single Tradovate login holding four funded evaluations is one connection and four sub-accounts. Everything that routes, mutes, mirrors or caps is per sub-account, never per connection — this is the distinction that matters most in the product.

Paper account

An account Quanify simulates itself: it fills against live prices, carries a balance and reports daily P&L like a real one, but it has no broker behind it. Paper accounts cannot be routed to a live broker by construction, not by a setting. See Accounts.

Funded account

A prop firm account you trade on the firm's capital under their rules. Quanify treats one as an ordinary sub-account — the firm's rules are enforced by the firm, so the per-account risk controls are what keep you inside them. See Prop firms.

Signals and strategies

Strategy

A source of signals. It can be one you built — a TradingView alert pointed at your webhook URL — or one you added from the published Quanify library. Either way it is a source, not a decision to trade: a strategy that is not attached to a trader does nothing at all.

Webhook

The URL a strategy posts to. Each strategy gets its own, carrying a token in the path and a password in the body. Anything that can send an HTTP POST can drive it — TradingView is simply the most common. See Webhooks and alerts.

Signal

One inbound message on a webhook: buy, sell, flat, and how much. A signal is a request. What it becomes depends on the trader it reaches and the risk controls on the accounts underneath.

Forward test

A published strategy's live, post-publication record. It is kept separate from the backtest that came with the card so you can see how the strategy has behaved since anyone could actually trade it. See Tracking.

Routing

Trader

The link between one strategy and the accounts it is allowed to trade. A trader is the unit you power on and off. This is the word most often confused with "strategy" — the strategy produces signals, the trader decides whose accounts they reach.

Routing

The engine-side record of which strategy may trade which accounts, at what size. Routing lives in the engine, not in your browser. What a trader card shows you is a report of that record, which is why a card will not claim to be armed until the engine has confirmed it.

Armed

A trader is armed when the engine holds live routing for it and the account underneath is enabled. Both halves are required. A powered-on trader with every account disabled trades nothing.

Contract size and lot multiplier

Two different ways to change size. A fixed contract size on a strategy overrides whatever quantity the signal carried. A lot multiplier on a Copy Trader follower scales the leader's quantity — 0.5 halves it, 2 doubles it. Fixed size answers "how much", the multiplier answers "how much relative to them".

Mute

A per-account switch that makes the account refuse incoming signals while leaving everything else configured. Mute is held by the engine, so it survives a refresh, a different device and a restart. Copy Trader sets and releases its own mutes automatically; a mute you set by hand is never cleared by the product.

Copy trading

Leader

The account being copied. Its fills are the source. A leader is an ordinary account you trade normally — nothing about being a leader changes how its own orders behave.

Follower

An account that mirrors the leader. Followers are per sub-account and each lands disabled when you add it.

Mirroring

Reproducing the leader's fill on a follower. Quanify mirrors on executions, not on orders: a leader order that fills in three pieces produces three mirrored fills, so a follower is never left holding a size the leader does not have.

Scale-in and scale-out

Growing a position you already hold, and reducing one. The distinction matters because the Allow 2+ entries risk control refuses scale-ins by default while always permitting scale-outs — you can always get smaller.

Flip

Crossing through flat in one signal: long to short, or short to long. Always permitted, since a flip ends with less exposure in the original direction, not more.

Measurement

Realized and unrealized P&L

Realized is closed. Unrealized is what an open position is currently worth against the market. The dashboard shows both, and keeps them separate, because a good realized day sitting on a bad open position is not a good day.

Drawdown

The distance from a peak in the equity curve to the lowest point after it. The number worth sizing against, because it is the loss you would have had to sit through to earn the return above it.

Sharpe and Sortino

Two return-per-unit-of-risk ratios. Sharpe divides by all volatility; Sortino divides only by downside volatility, so it does not punish a strategy for making money quickly. Quanify withholds both when the sample is too thin to mean anything. See Analytics.