The equity curve is the single most important chart for evaluating your trading performance over time. It plots your cumulative profit and loss on the Y-axis against time on the X-axis, giving you an immediate visual sense of whether your account is growing, flat, or declining.
In Katalyst, the equity curve is available on both the Dashboard (simplified view) and the Analytics page (detailed view). The Analytics version includes additional overlays such as drawdown shading, moving averages, and benchmark comparisons. You can toggle these overlays on and off using the controls above the chart.
A healthy equity curve trends upward with relatively shallow drawdowns. If you see long flat periods, it may indicate that your strategy is not generating enough edge, or that you are giving back profits on certain types of trades. The drawdown overlay is particularly useful — it shades the area between each new equity high and the subsequent low, making it easy to see your worst losing streaks.
You can filter the equity curve by account, date range, instrument, or tag. This lets you isolate specific strategies or time periods. For example, filtering by a specific tag might reveal that your “breakout” trades produce a smooth upward curve while your “counter-trend” trades create most of your drawdowns.
The equity curve also supports a “trade-by-trade” mode where each point represents a single trade rather than a time-based interval. This view is useful for seeing how individual trades contribute to your overall trajectory, regardless of when they occurred.