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Reading the signal

In the trend, or in cash. Nothing to interpret.

Vektor's answer is binary: it is either holding the trend or holding nothing. Everything it draws on the chart exists to make that state — and your exit — visible at a glance.

Long or flat

Two states. Most days, it's flat.

LONG

Price has broken out and the trend is confirmed. Vektor is in, with its exit line already on the chart below price. It stays long until price closes back through that line.

FLAT

No confirmed trend, so Vektor holds nothing. Cash is a position — it is how the system sits out chop and crashes. Most days are flat, and that is deliberate.

+Long/flat by design. The Bitcoin build includes an optional short side, but it ships off — leave it off unless you have tested it yourself and accept the trade-off its tooltip describes.

What's on the chart

Three marks. Each one earns its place.

The entry chip #

A small lime L chip prints under the bar where a long opens. It appears on the close of that bar and never moves — if you see a chip, a real fill happened there in the tester and would have happened live.

The breakout level #

A faint horizontal line tracks the recent high that price has to close above to trigger an entry. When the chart is flat, this line is the answer to “what would it take?” — no close above it, no trade.

The trail — your exit line #

The moment a trade opens, a solid line sits below price: the trailing exit. It only ratchets — it moves up as the trend runs and never loosens — so gains get locked in behind the move. When price closes through it, the position closes and Vektor is flat again. It defines your risk up front; it does not remove it, and it cannot promise a fill through slippage, gaps, or an outage.

Thinking in R

R is your unit. Not dollars, not percent.

One idea makes every Vektor number legible: R, the initial risk on a trade.

What R means

R is the distance from your entry to the initial exit line — the amount the trade loses if it stops out immediately. A trade that runs to twice that distance is “up 2R”; a full stop-out is “−1R”. Because Vektor sizes every position off this distance, −1R costs the same fraction of your account on every trade, calm market or wild one.

Where you meet R in Vektor

The optional protective layers in the settings are set in R: the breakeven lock arms once a trade is up a chosen R multiple (so a green trade can no longer close red), and the profit lock tightens the trail after a bigger run measured in R. The benchmark table's “avg win / avg loss” row is the same idea across the whole history.

+Trend systems win by asymmetry, not hit rate: expect more losing trades than winners, with winners several times the size in R. A backtest showing a very high win rate is a warning sign, not a feature.

The two tables

The chart explains itself.

Two small on-chart tables keep the live state and the benchmark in view.

The state table (bottom-right) #

Live status: the current state (LONG or FLAT), whether a fresh breakout printed, which way the trail points, the current size multiplier, your live exposure, and a Setup row that confirms the symbol and chart match what the build expects — with a ⚠ warning when they don't.

The benchmark table (top-right) #

The honesty check: Vektor's return, CAGR (the average yearly growth rate), max drawdown (the deepest drop from a peak), trade count, win rate, profit factor (dollars won for every dollar lost), and avg win / avg loss, next to buy & hold on the exact chart you loaded. It does not always beat holding, and it never hides that. More under limitations.

Why did nothing happen today? #

Check the state table first: if the state is FLAT and no breakout printed, silence is the system working. Roughly a handful of trades per market per year is the normal cadence on the daily scale — see timeframes.

Didn't find it?

A real person reads every message.

The assistant in the corner answers most questions on the spot, and it knows these pages. For anything account-specific, email the desk at desk@vektoralgo.com — no ticket queue, no bots.