Timeline

The timeline is the horizontal strip below the chart. It shows the time range you picked for your backtest and where playback is right now.

A live demo — try clicking, dragging, scrolling to zoom, holding Shift and dragging to pan, and toggling the auto-follow target icon on and off:

Reading the timeline

The ruler shows time labels — seconds, minutes, hours, days, depending on how far you zoom in or out. Labels and tick lines change automatically as you zoom.

The blue line at the bottom marks your selected interval — the range from your start date to your end date. When the timeline shows the full range, this line spans the whole width.

The vertical blue line is the playhead — your current time in the backtest. It moves to the right as playback runs.

If you zoom or pan outside your selected interval, the area outside turns gray. That's a hint: there is no data beyond your start and end dates.

Jumping in time

Click anywhere on the timeline to jump there. Or drag to scrub through time. This is one of the most powerful things you can do in StrategyTune — replay any moment of the past instantly, as many times as you want.

Jumping forward

The backtest fast-forwards to the new time. Anything that would have happened during the skipped period still happens — for example, a take-profit or stop-loss order that should have triggered on a price move executes exactly as if you had watched it play out. Your account state catches up.

Jumping backward

Going back is more interesting, because the future from this point on is already known. Events that happened in the time you skipped (filled orders, closed trades, P&L changes) become pending events — set aside but not deleted. A popup appears at the top-center of the screen showing how many events are pending, with three things you can do next:

• Resume playback and do nothing. As time replays, the pending events fire again at the exact same moments. When playback catches up, your account is back to the state it had before the jump. You just rewatched those minutes.
• Delete the pending events from the popup. They're gone for good. From this moment on, the backtest behaves as if those orders and trades never happened.
• Place a new order or trade. This deletes the pending events automatically. You're now on a new branch of the timeline — the old "future" is erased and your new actions take its place.

Why the popup exists: account state can't be merged between two different outcomes. When you rewind and act differently, you're picking a new branch of history and the old one is cleared.

Zoom and pan

Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Zoom is anchored under your cursor — whatever you point at stays in place while the rest of the timeline scales around it.

Hold Shift and drag to slide the view left or right without jumping the playhead.

Zooming in lets you study small windows — a few seconds of action, an order fill, a single candle close. Zoom out for the wider picture.

Auto-follow

The target icon next to the timeline is the auto-follow toggle.

When auto-follow is on (icon lit up), the view shifts automatically to keep the playhead visible during playback. As the playhead reaches the right edge, the view scrolls forward.

When auto-follow is off, the view stays where you put it. The playhead keeps moving and will slide out of sight. Useful when you want to focus on one short moment and replay it without the view drifting away.

If you pan or zoom in such a way that the playhead leaves the visible area, auto-follow turns itself off so it stops fighting your interaction. Click the icon to turn it back on — the view will snap back to the playhead.

Reset zoom

The curved-arrow icon resets the view to your full selected interval: your start date sits on the left edge, your end date sits on the right edge, and the timeline shows the entire range. Use it whenever you've zoomed in or panned around and want to see everything again.

Tracks

Below the ruler you can stack extra rows — filters, signals, and system events — to overlay more context on the backtest. Open the + menu in the top-left of the timeline to add one. Each track gets its own row with a label and a delete button (visible on hover).

Filters are coming. They'll let you highlight time ranges where a user-defined condition is true or false, so you can see at a glance which stretches are worth replaying and which to skip.

Signals are also coming. They'll mark single moments where something happens — for example, an indicator crossing a level — so you can jump straight to the interesting points. Both filters and signals exist to help you skip the parts that aren't important for your strategy.

System events already work. There's one item today, Trade events: a vertical tick at every user trade action (order placed, fill, cancel). Ticks behind the playhead are amber. When you rewind past them they turn gray — they're now "future" events that will execute again as playback catches up, at which point they flip back to amber. If you cancel those future events — either from the popup, or by placing a new trade (which clears them automatically) — the gray ticks disappear from the timeline. Use this track for a quick overview of what happened and when across the whole run.

Click the trash icon on a track row (visible on hover) to remove it from the timeline. Your list of tracks is saved in this browser's local storage, so it'll be there next time you open the page on this device — but it won't follow you to another browser or another machine.

How the timeline connects to other controls

• Start and End date pickers at the top of the screen set the interval that the timeline shows. Changing them resets the playhead to the new start.
• Play / Pause and the speed selector drive how fast the playhead moves.
• Reset in the main toolbar restarts the whole backtest from the start. (This is different from the timeline's Reset zoom button, which only changes what part of the timeline is on screen.)
• Saved sessions restore both your selected interval and the playhead's position, so you can come back later and pick up exactly where you left off.