Copier PnL — the total profit or loss of everyone copying a lead, as reported by the exchange. Different from the lead's own return, because copiers join later, get filled at worse prices, and pay a share of profits.
Profit factor — gross profit divided by gross loss. Above 1.0 means the wins outweigh the losses. More honest than win rate, which says only how often you win, not by how much.
Max drawdown (MDD) — the deepest fall from a peak. Recovery is not symmetric: −50% needs +100% to get back to even.
Leverage — borrowed size. At 20x, a 5% move against the position wipes out the margin behind it. It multiplies outcomes, it does not create edge.
Funding rate — a payment exchanged every few hours between long and short holders of a perpetual contract. Persistently positive funding means leveraged longs are paying to stay in.
Overfitting — tuning a strategy until it fits the past, including the past's noise. Recognisable by results that collapse on data the tuning never saw.
Walk-forward test — optimise on old data, test on the next unseen period, repeat. The honest alternative to a single backtest.
Survivorship bias — judging a population by the members that survived. A leaderboard is survivorship bias with a ranking: the accounts that blew up are simply not on it.
Independent analysis of publicly available Binance copy-trading data. Not affiliated with Binance. Not financial advice. All figures come from Binance's public API at crawl time.