Variants & comparison

A variant freezes a moment of your analysis so you can compare alternatives — "all days" vs. "Mondays off", $50k vs. $100k, this weighting vs. that one — on the same chart.

What a variant captures

Each variant stores both halves of a configuration:

the recipe — initial capital, mode, the strategies with their weights, visibility and per-strategy sizing (plus the max daily risk and compounding), the groups with their size knobs, and the weekday filters;
the results — the computed equity, drawdown and metrics at the moment you froze it.

A variant also keeps the trade-level data of every strategy that has it, alongside the snapshot, so restoring it reproduces the exact same allocation — premiums and intraday order included. This matters beyond dynamically sized legs: with the margin cap on, the margin held by your fixed legs is the non-reducible base the cap subtracts from the day's cash limit, so a variant that lost it would let the sized legs grow past what the account could actually carry.

Variant vs. saved portfolio

A saved portfolio is a reusable starting point you reload into a session. A variant is a parallel scenario: it keeps its own recipe and results, sits next to Current in the rail, and you go on working on it there — without ever touching the session you have open.

Variants vs. History

History is the volatile, automatic log of every change in the current session, with undo/redo. A variant is the persisted snapshot you create on purpose. Explore in History, then save the versions worth keeping as variants.

The lifecycle

Freeze

Save the current session as a variant (from the status bar or the command palette). The + variant tab in the strategies rail and the tray's Import menu freeze an external source the same way, without disturbing your live session: pick a CSV to turn it straight into a comparable variant, or pick a portfolio already saved in the library. Past eight saved portfolios those menus list only the ones you used most recently; either way their last line, Browse the library…, opens the full picker — search, tags, sort and tick boxes — so you can freeze several portfolios at once, each becoming its own variant ready to compare.

Pin to compare

Pin variants to overlay them on the Workspace charts — each gets its own colour and dash — and add delta columns to the metrics so differences are explicit. Up to eight variants can be pinned at once (one per colour in the palette); the archive shows a live n/8 counter and greys out the pin on the remaining rows when the comparison is full. Once at least one variant is pinned, the Current cell in the tray becomes a toggle: switch it off to hide the live session and read the pinned variants on their own. It turns back on automatically when the last pin is removed. Pinned variant curves are independent of the live session's strategies as well: hiding or switching off every strategy in the current session never removes them from the chart.

Keep working on it

Select the variant's tab in the strategies rail and edit it in place — see Editing a variant below. Your live session is untouched.

Restore

Open a variant to restore its recipe into a new session and continue from there. The variant itself stays where it is.

Rename or delete

Add a note to remember the idea, or delete the variant when you're done.

Variants belong to the portfolio on the desk

Variants live alongside the session they compare, so the two gestures that take that portfolio off the desk also empty the registry: New session in the workspace header — replacing what you are working on with CSVs, a library item or a backtest — and Delete session in the status bar. Both wipe every variant, not only the pinned ones, because a snapshot of another portfolio would end up compared against curves it has nothing to do with. Both say so before you confirm, and the New session dialog counts how many are about to go. Anything worth keeping across portfolios belongs in the library as a saved portfolio, or should be exported first.

Editing a variant

A variant's tab in the strategies rail is a second workspace, not a preview. Select it and you get the same controls as Current, acting on that variant:

contracts, sizing and costs — the ± editor, the sizing popover and the costs popover, including "Apply" across a multi-row selection;
weekday filters — the M T W T F dots per strategy;
groups — create a sleeve, rename it, turn its size knob, edit its members, solo/mute, dissolve it;
rename, delete, reorder — inline rename, the bin, drag & drop and the Sort menu;
add strategies — from the library, from a saved backtest, or by dropping a CSV;
details — the per-strategy and per-group detail panels, computed on the variant's own numbers.

Every change recalculates the variant: its equity, drawdown and metrics are recomputed, and its sparkline, its pinned curve on the charts and its row in the archive follow within a moment. Its identity doesn't move — same name, same notes, same position in the archive, same creation date.

A variant always keeps at least one strategy

Removing the last strategy is refused: a variant with nothing in it can neither be compared nor restored. Delete the variant itself (the bin next to Composition) if you no longer need it.

Your live session never moves

Editing a variant writes only to that variant. This is the whole point: hold several scenarios side by side and compare them, instead of overwriting the one you have open. The reverse is true too — changing Current leaves every variant exactly as it was.

CSVs that need import review

A file whose column mapping VEEMAN can't resolve on its own needs the review step, which runs on the current configuration. Load it there, then add the resulting strategy to the variant from the library.

Browsing the archive

The tray in the Workspace is a horizontal strip: it holds four or five variants in view and scrolls for the rest, which is fine while you are comparing a handful. Past that, open All variants from the tray header — it shows every saved variant in one table, without leaving the Workspace, so the pins you set there are on the charts the moment you close it.

The table gives you what the strip cannot:

Search across names and notes, which is usually where you wrote down why a variant exists;
Sort by any column — click a header to rank by profit, CAGR, Sharpe, max drawdown, number of strategies or creation order, click again to flip the direction. Variants with a missing metric always sort last, in both directions;
Multiple selection — tick rows (hold Shift for a range) and delete them in one go, instead of confirming one variant at a time;
the full figures, notes, covered period and creation date, none of which fit in a tray cell.

The same table is also a page of its own under Variants in the sidebar. Use it when there is no live session to open the tray from: variants are stored per user and outlive the working session, so after a 24-hour session expiry the page is where your archive still is. Anywhere else in the analysis section, adding ?variants=1 to the URL opens the archive on top of the page you are on.

Renaming, deleting and restoring

Rename, open and delete work the same in both places — and in the tray's own actions menu. The only difference is where you land afterwards: from the page, opening a variant takes you to the Workspace; from the modal, it just closes.

Variants and versions are different axes

Inside a shared space a saved object also carries a version history. The two do not overlap:

a variant is a snapshot you promote, to compare configurations side by side;
a version is written automatically at every save of a shared object, to answer "who changed this, and what did it look like before".

Variants are the axis of comparison; versions the axis of saves. History (undo/redo) is a third axis again: the gestures inside one session.

See what changed

Every variant's actions menu in the Workspace tray has "What changes vs Current". It opens a side-by-side matrix: the live Current session is the reference column, and every saved variant sits in its own column next to it. Each row is a strategy, showing its weight (contracts), whether it's active, and its weekday filter, exactly as in the Workspace.

Anything a variant changes versus Current is marked in amber — a hidden strategy, a different weight, a toggled day, a changed capital or mode — so your eye lands on the differences first. The strategy name and the Current column stay pinned while you scroll across many variants, and you can restore any variant into a new session straight from its column.

The contracts shown are the effective ones, so a strategy inside a group is compared at the exposure its sleeve's size knob gives it. Turning that knob therefore shows up as a difference on every member, even though none of their own weights changed — which is exactly what moved the curve.

Reading the matrix

The Current column is never highlighted: it is the baseline, and amber always means "this variant differs from Current here". A variant with no amber is configured identically to your live session.

Automatic naming

When you freeze a variant, VEEMAN suggests a plain progressive name — V1, V2, V3… — which you can rename at any time. What each variant changed versus your live session isn't encoded in the name; it's shown explicitly in the "What changes vs Current" matrix above, which understands capital changes, mode switches, weight changes, strategies added or hidden, and weekday toggles.

A good comparison workflow

Start from a baseline, freeze it, change one thing (a weight, a day, the capital), freeze again, and pin both. Because only one variable moved, the overlay shows you exactly what that change did.