Pure numbers often mean nothing unless you compare them to some benchmark. Tear Sheet is a useful functionality embedded in our backtest system that helps you to analyse all the performance details of your portfolio or strategy and compare it to whatever benchmark you want.
The first step is always to generate backtest results before comparing them against the benchmark and looking up performance details. When the backtest is done, you can access the details from the Portfolio or Strategy Backtests results page. To open the Tear Sheet, click the button in the upper right corner.
It's totally up to you which benchmark you'd like to choose. It might be an index (written with a ^ mark) or any other financial instrument out of 37k+ that we cover. The most popular way, though, is to compare your results against the S&P 500.
Click on the button, wait for a few seconds, and you'll see this:
You can find here not only exact performance details of your strategy, such as annual and cumulative returns, maximum drawdown, volatility, or a few popular ratios, as well as the beta and alpha indicators; but also a full comparison to the benchmark (in thst case, the S&P 500).
Thanks to that, you can precisely assess whether your strategy is better than the market as a whole or not.