---
title: "Equity curve"
description: "An equity curve is the line plotting a strategy's value across every date of its backtest, so the shape of the result is visible, not only its final number."
canonical_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/analysis/equity-curve"
last_updated: "2026-07-25"
md_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/analysis/equity-curve.md"
---

# Equity curve

An equity curve is the line that plots a strategy's value at every date of its backtest, from the first simulated day to the last, so you can read the whole path a result took rather than only the number it ended on. Two strategies can finish at exactly the same value while their curves look nothing alike — one climbing steadily, the other spiking and collapsing — and the curve is where that difference becomes visible.

**Also seen as:** growth chart, capital curve

## What does the Growth chart actually show?

Fincanva titles this chart **Growth**, on the **Capital Growth** page of a strategy's analysis. The **Growth** chart draws one curve for your strategy across the whole simulated period, with a dashed **Benchmark** line behind it and a shorter **Drawdown** panel stacked underneath sharing the same dates. A toggle in the chart header switches the curve between two readings of the same result: your account's base-currency code shows it as money, and **%** shows it as cumulative return.

In the money reading, the filled area is **Total value** — everything the strategy is worth on that date — with a second **Cash capital** area inside it for the part sitting in cash; the vertical axis is titled **Value**. In the **%** reading the single line is **Growth**, the return accumulated since the start, and the axis is titled **Return**. The lower panel is the same in both: an area titled **Drawdown**, hanging down from zero, showing how far below its previous peak the strategy was on each date.

Above the chart sit the period buttons and a zoom bar that narrow the visible date range, and three display switches — **Inflation-adj.**, **Benchmark** and **Log scale** — which change how the same curve is drawn without re-running anything. See [chart toggles](/docs/analysis/chart-toggles) for what each one does.

The **Performance Metrics** page carries a second, simpler version of the curve: the strategy's return as a soft filled area behind a headline reading **Overall return**, with the benchmark as a dashed line. It is the same series, presented as a summary rather than as a chart you interrogate.

## How do you read one equity curve?

Read it in four places, left to right.

1. **The left edge** is the starting capital — where every curve begins, so the strategy and its benchmark start from the same amount and stay directly comparable.
2. **The slope** is the pace. A steep stretch is a period of fast gains; a flat stretch is a period where the strategy went nowhere, which costs nothing but time.
3. **The dips** are the falls from a previous high. The deepest one over the whole period is the [max drawdown](/docs/analysis/max-drawdown), and it is exactly the deepest point of the **Drawdown** panel below.
4. **The right edge** is the final value, and the gap between it and the left edge is the [total return](/docs/analysis/total-return). The [CAGR](/docs/analysis/cagr) is that same gap expressed as a yearly pace.

The distance between your curve and the [benchmark](/docs/getting-started/benchmark) line at any date is how far ahead or behind the strategy was at that point — and the shared crosshair labels it "Ahead" or "Behind" as you hover. Because the benchmark is run as its own full simulation over the same dates and the same starting capital, the two lines are always on the same footing.

## Defaults in Fincanva

- The curve covers the full simulated period by default; the period buttons and zoom bar change what you see, never what was computed.
- The **Benchmark** line is shown unless you switch it off.
- The money reading and the **%** reading are the same underlying result — the toggle changes the unit, not the run.
- The curve only exists after a backtest has completed. Before that the page reads "No results yet" and "Backtest this strategy to generate its capital analysis."

## Worked example

A strategy starts a ten-year backtest with 10,000 and ends at 24,000. The **%** reading of that same curve ends at +140%, its [total return](/docs/analysis/total-return); the [CAGR](/docs/analysis/cagr) works out near 9.1% a year.

But the path matters. Suppose the curve climbs to 18,000 in year six, falls back to 12,600 during year seven, and only regains 18,000 in year nine before finishing at 24,000. The fall from 18,000 to 12,600 is −30%, so the **Drawdown** panel dips to −30% at that point and the metrics table reports −30% as the max drawdown. Reading only the ending — 24,000, +140% — hides two years spent below a level the strategy had already reached. That is the whole reason the curve is shown next to the numbers instead of behind them.

## What does the shape of a curve tell you?

The shape tells you how a result was produced, not whether it is worth having. A curve that rises in small steady steps and one that jumps in a few large bursts can end at the same value while having behaved completely differently along the way, and the second one's outcome depended much more heavily on the particular window the backtest covered. A curve whose gains all arrive in one stretch is one worth checking against [start-date sensitivity](/docs/analysis/start-date-sensitivity), which re-runs the same strategy from many different starting months.

A curve also cannot be read as a forecast in any form: it is one path through one set of historical dates, and its slope has no predictive claim on the dates after it.

*An equity curve shows what a strategy would have done on historical data, not what it will do. Fincanva provides no financial advice — see [Is this financial advice?](/docs/investing-theory/is-this-financial-advice).*