What I learned building my trading performance dashboard

I run a few trading systems, and I built a small website to keep track of how they're doing. It's a performance dashboard at avd-trading-dashboard.vercel.app, and it shows each trading account's value over time, its daily gains and losses, the positions it currently holds, and a few standard risk numbers like the largest drop from a previous high. I use it to check on the systems, and it also doubles as a portfolio demo, so other people look at it too.

The dashboard follows three accounts at three different companies, and they aren't all the same kind of account.

• Alpaca is a stock brokerage. My Alpaca account is a paper account, which means it trades with simulated money against real market prices.
• OANDA is a currency (forex) broker, where you trade one currency against another, like euros against US dollars. My OANDA account is a demo account, which is OANDA's name for the same kind of simulated money.
• Kalshi is a regulated exchange for event contracts, which are yes-or-no questions about the future that pay out $1 if the answer is yes and nothing if it's no. My Kalshi account is live and uses real money.

Most of the work on this project turned out to be making sure each page is clear about which kind of account it's showing and what its numbers actually measure. The charts themselves were the easy part.

Keeping simulated and real money apart

When several accounts sit side by side in the same design, it's easy for a visitor to assume they're equally meaningful, but a simulated result and a real-money result don't tell you the same thing. A paper account never has to find a real buyer or seller, so its orders fill at prices the broker simulates, and those tend to be kinder than what you'd get with real money in the real market. A paper result is a useful test, but it doesn't carry the same weight as a result where real money changed hands.

So I made the account type part of the page itself. The Alpaca and OANDA pages both say "Broker-sourced paper trading track record" under the title, and they name the account, for example "Paper account" for Alpaca and "OANDA demo account" for OANDA. The Kalshi page says "Broker-sourced live-account performance" and "Live real-money account." Nobody should have to go digging to find out whether the money was real.

Why the Kalshi chart only counts finished contracts

Kalshi needed a different kind of chart, and it comes down to how event contracts work. You buy a contract for somewhere between one cent and 99 cents, and when the question is decided (Kalshi calls this settling) the contract pays either $1 or nothing. Kalshi lists contracts on all sorts of things, and plenty of them run for weeks or months. Kalshi has cryptocurrency contracts that expire every fifteen minutes, every hour and every day, and the ones this account trades are the fifteen-minute Bitcoin contracts.

Before a contract settles, its price is really just the market's current guess, and that guess can swing all the way to $1 or all the way to zero within minutes. If I counted open contracts at their current price, the performance chart would show gains and losses that often vanish a few minutes later. So on the Kalshi page the performance chart only moves when a contract settles and the result is final. The page still shows my current cash and any open contracts, but separately, as a picture of the account right now. The footnote on that page says it plainly: "The performance curve only changes when a contract settles. Current cash and open contracts are context, not performance history."

Stocks and currencies work differently. A position can stay open for days, and brokers report the account's total value at any moment (cash plus what the open positions are currently worth). For Alpaca and OANDA the chart follows that total value as the brokers report it, because it's the standard way to measure those accounts and it shows what happened between trades.

Getting the numbers onto the page

A small program on my home server asks each broker for its account data every five minutes. It works out the charts and statistics and publishes them to the website as plain data files, and the website just reads those files. The brokers' login keys stay on my server and never go anywhere near the public site, so a visitor can look at the numbers but nothing on the website can place a trade or see anything beyond what I chose to publish.

What I'd tell someone building one

If you're building a dashboard like this, I'd suggest deciding what each number means before you design how it looks, and then writing that meaning on the page where people will actually see it. For me that meant labeling every account as paper or live money, only charting Kalshi results once they were final, and keeping the account keys off the public site.

You can see the dashboard at avd-trading-dashboard.vercel.app, and the Kalshi page in particular shows the settled-contracts-only chart described above.