MFE and MAE analysis: inspect excursions and realized outcomes
Inspect imported favorable and adverse excursion values, their scatter plot, and Pineify’s derived efficiency ratios. Learn what trade extrema cannot establish.
Calculate MFE / MAE Analysis From Your TradesWhat Is MFE / MAE Analysis?
Maximum favorable excursion (MFE) describes the greatest favorable movement during a trade; maximum adverse excursion (MAE) describes the greatest adverse movement. TradingView reports excursion amounts and percentages in its trade results. Pineify reads the exported excursion amounts rather than reconstructing the price path from OHLC data.
The two extrema do not establish their order or timing. The same MFE and MAE can come from a trade that fell first and rallied later or one that rallied first and then fell. Neither pattern alone identifies a profitable change to the entry or exit.
Formula
How to Read This Number
The scatter plot places MAE on the horizontal axis and MFE on the vertical axis, in the configured currency display. A point near the upper left has relatively large favorable and small adverse excursion. That says nothing about how quickly the favorable movement arrived. Large values on both axes mean both extrema were large; their sequence is unknown.
An illustrative MFE of 200, MAE of 100, and net PnL of 50 produces entry efficiency of about 66.7% and exit efficiency of 25%. Those ratios describe this record. They do not prove that the entry was early or that the trader could have captured the maximum at an executable price.
Comparisons can be distorted by position size, contract multipliers, fees, partial exits, and missing fields. Inspect individual trades before treating a cluster as evidence for a rule change.
What Counts as Good?
| Range | Value | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| Favorable share | Entry: 0–100% | The favorable excursion’s share of the sum of extrema, subject to clamping and zero-denominator fallbacks. It does not measure elapsed timing. |
| Realized outcome | Exit: −100–100% | Net PnL relative to MFE, clamped by the app. Negative means a net losing trade, not proof of a particular price sequence. |
| Missing excursions | May display 0 | The importer defaults missing excursion amounts to zero. Verify the source columns before interpreting fallback efficiency values. |
How Pineify Calculates MFE / MAE Analysis
The importer reads favorable/adverse excursion currency fields from each trade’s exit row, takes absolute values, and stores them as runUp and drawdown. It does not fetch price history or recompute the extrema. Missing values default to zero, so a complete-looking chart is not proof that the export included valid excursion data. The scatter chart uses those amounts directly and colors positive net-PnL trades separately from non-positive trades. The derived efficiency ratios use the formulas above. Preserve consistent currency and sizing assumptions when comparing trades. To evaluate a new stop, inspect both winners and losers and rerun the changed strategy on independent data with intrabar and fill assumptions. Selecting a stop from winning trades alone conditions on survival and ignores how the changed exit would alter the trade path. A bar’s high and low include extremes, but do not reveal when they occurred relative to an intrabar entry or exit. The reported excursion is not automatically a lower bound on the true tradable path. Parsing and calculations run locally. Optional AI analysis sends derived report summaries to the analysis API; that is separate from the local excursion calculation.
Review Your MFE / MAE Analysis
Upload your TradingView backtest CSV and get MFE / MAE Analysis alongside other return and risk metrics. Check the input assumptions before comparing results.
Analyze Your Backtest NowSources and calculation references
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about this metric