Would your idea have made money?
The ORTEX Backtester turns the whole data platform into a laboratory. Describe a trading idea in plain rules, then replay it across years of real market history. No code, no spreadsheets: you see every trade the idea would have taken, and whether it actually worked.
The power is in the inputs
Most backtesters only know price. The ORTEX Backtester lets a rule draw on the same data professional desks pay for — hundreds of data points across positioning, price, fundamentals, options and events, and millions of ways to combine them into rules — so you can finally answer questions like: what would buying oversold stocks with rising short interest, and closing them when the pressure eased, have returned?
Intraday estimates of short interest, cost to borrow, availability, utilization and days to cover — the positioning data most backtesters have no access to.
Price and volume, RSI, MACD, moving averages and the usual momentum and mean-reversion building blocks.
Valuation, growth, profitability and balance-sheet metrics, so a rule can screen on quality as well as price action.
Unusual options flow and Greeks, to condition entries on what the derivatives market is doing.
Earnings, index changes and other scheduled events, to trade around, or steer clear of, known catalysts.
From idea to verdict in four steps
A few ideas you could test
These are starting points, not tips. Each one is a question you can put to the data, tune, and judge for yourself, on your own universe and dates:
- →Buy stocks that fall below RSI 30 while short interest is rising, and close when short interest starts to fall.
- →Enter when utilization crosses 90% and the borrow fee is climbing, and exit on a fixed profit target or stop.
- →Hold quality names, positive free cash flow and low leverage, only while price sits above the 200-day average.
- →Trade the drift into an index rebalance and close the position on the effective date.
Read these as “to trade like this backtest, you’d buy X and close on Y” — a description of what the simulation did, not advice to buy or sell anything. Whether an idea is right for you is your decision.
Reading the report
The headline gain over the whole run, and the compound annual rate it works out to.
Return earned per unit of risk, so a volatile strategy and a steady one can be compared fairly.
The worst peak-to-trough fall along the way — the pain you'd have had to sit through.
The share of trades that closed in profit.
Every position, with its entry, exit and the reason it closed, rolled up per ticker.
When you’re happy, switch it on
A backtest is where an idea earns your confidence. Once it has, you don’t have to watch the market for it by hand. Turn the strategy on and ORTEX runs your exact rules against live data, then alerts you the moment a stock meets them — with the position the strategy would take, entry, size and exit — ready for you to review and action right away.
It’s the same rules you just tested, now working in real time: the backtest tells you whether the idea held up over years of history, and the alerts tell you when it’s happening again today.
Alerts follow the rules you configure and flag when your own strategy’s conditions are met. They are not advice, a recommendation, or a signal from ORTEX to buy or sell — whether and how to act on them is your decision.
The same data, on the platform and in your code
Every input the backtester uses is live on the ORTEX platform and ships raw over the REST API, Python SDK and Excel add-in. Explore the short interest data and the Stock Score model the strategies draw on.
Put your idea to the test.
Build and save a strategy free. Running a backtest is included on paid plans, and the universe size and history scale with the tier.
The results shown on this page are hypothetical and illustrative. Backtests are simulations run on historical data with the benefit of hindsight; they do not represent actual trading, and no account traded them. They do not account for trading or borrowing costs, commissions, fees, taxes, slippage, financing or available liquidity, so real results would differ and are likely to be lower. Any strategy shown is an illustration of how the tool works, not a recommendation to buy or sell any security or to adopt any strategy, and nothing here is investment advice or a personal recommendation. Past performance, whether actual or hypothetical, is not a reliable indicator of future results. The value of investments can go down as well as up and you may get back less than you invest; short selling carries additional and potentially unlimited risk. ORTEX short interest and borrow figures are estimates produced by our models, not exchange or regulatory filings, and data may contain errors — validate independently before acting. Alerts generated from a strategy follow the rules you configure and are not advice, a recommendation, or a signal from ORTEX to buy or sell any security; whether and how to act on them is your decision. For the full terms, see our Terms & Conditions.
See also: Stock Scores, Short Interest, Index Rebalance forecasts and the ORTEX API.