Core concepts

A handful of terms appear throughout VECTOR. Learn these once and the whole app reads clearly.

Strategy

A strategy is a single daily profit/loss series — typically one uploaded file. Internally, whatever the source format, VECTOR reduces it to one canonical shape: a value of P/L per day. Multiple trades on the same day are summed into that day's total.

A strategy carries a name (from the file or a Strategy column), a weight and a visibility flag (you can hide a strategy without removing it).

Session

A session is your live workspace: the set of strategies currently loaded, their weights, the initial capital, the analysis mode and any weekday filters. It is created on your first upload. The status bar leads with where the session comes from: a fresh upload reads Session · unsaved until you persist it, after which it shows the portfolio name (when loaded from the library) or the variant name (when restored, tagged restored). As soon as you change a loaded session — weights, visibility, order, capital, mode or weekday filters — an unsaved tag appears next to its name, and it clears again the moment you save (or revert the change). Whenever there are unsaved changes a save control appears and opens a save dialog. For a fresh session the dialog asks for a name and an optional description and stores it as a new portfolio. For a session you loaded from a portfolio the dialog offers two choices side by side: Update, which overwrites that same portfolio in place, and Save as new — which reveals the name + description form and stores the current changes as a fresh, separately named portfolio that leaves the original untouched. Restoring a variant and saving likewise creates a new portfolio. The same save control sits both in the status bar (next to the session name, across all analysis modules) and in the Workspace header.

Initial capital & equity

The initial capital is the starting value of the portfolio's equity. The equity curve is built additively:

equity(t) = initial_capital + cumulative_sum( weighted daily P/L up to t )

So capital sets the baseline the P/L accumulates on — it shifts and scales percentage figures, but the dollar P/L itself comes from your trades.

Weight

A weight is a multiplier on a strategy's daily P/L — not an allocation percentage. A weight of 2.0 doubles that strategy's contribution to the portfolio; 0.5 halves it; 0 mutes it. Changing a weight rescales that strategy's P/L before everything is summed, so the whole curve and every metric update accordingly. Details in Weights & capital.

Mode: dollars or percent

Analysis runs in one of two modes:

• Dollars — the equity curve and figures are in account currency.
• Percent — equity is expressed as a percentage return on the initial capital.

Saved portfolio vs. saved strategy

Your library holds two kinds of saved object:

• A saved strategy is one reusable P/L series you can add to future portfolios.
• A saved portfolio is a named snapshot of several strategies and their settings, ready to reload into a new session.

These persist to your account. See Library.

Variant

A variant is a frozen snapshot of a session — its recipe (capital, mode, the strategies with their weights/visibility, weekday filters) plus the computed results (equity, drawdown, metrics). Unlike a saved portfolio, a variant is immutable: you freeze it to remember a specific configuration, pin several variants to overlay them on the Workspace charts, and restore one into a brand-new session when you want to continue from there. See Variants & comparison.

What persists, and what doesn't

Next: import your data cleanly — Supported formats.