Cashflow Engine – SPX 0DTE strategy analyticsLogin
BlueprintUpdated

Stress Testing — Monte Carlo

The Monte Carlo tab resamples your portfolio's historical daily P/L into thousands of alternative equity paths, so you judge the distribution of outcomes instead of one lucky history.

One backtest is one path — the sequence of days that happened to occur. The Monte Carlo simulation, the second tab of the Portfolio workspace, resamples your portfolio's historical daily P/L with replacement into thousands of alternative paths, so you can see the distribution: the median outcome, the tails, and above all the drawdowns you'd need to sit through.

The Monte Carlo tab: drawdown scenario cards and the simulated equity paths band chart

Why this matters for 0DTE portfolios

Credit-spread portfolios have a characteristic shape: many small winning days, occasional sharp losing days. Whether a given sequence of those days feels survivable depends heavily on their order — the same set of trading days rearranged can produce a gentle year or a brutal quarter. That's sequence risk, and it's invisible in a single backtest. Resampling makes it visible: across thousands of orderings you see the realistic range of drawdowns, not just the one that history happened to produce.

What the simulation does, in one paragraph

Each simulation draws N random days from your portfolio's daily-P/L pool (N = horizon ÷ 12 × 252 trading days) and accumulates them onto your initial capital — one equity path. Across all paths, the app takes the 5th/50th/95th percentiles at each step for the band chart, every path's terminal value for the return scenarios, and every path's max drawdown for the drawdown scenarios. Optionally, it injects worst-case events into every path — either your portfolio's real worst day, or a theoretical simultaneous max loss.

The pages in this section

  • Running a simulation — every setting: simulations, horizon, initial capital, and the stress injection with its two worst-case modes.
  • Reading the results — the key metrics, the return and drawdown scenario cards, the equity-path band chart and the distributions.
  • Limitations & caveats — what resampling can and cannot tell you. Read this one; it's short and it's the honest part.

Disclaimer

Cashflow Engine is analytics and educational software — not financial advice, and not an investment adviser, broker, or signal service. It issues no buy or sell recommendations and never holds or manages your money. Trading options carries substantial risk, including the loss of your entire investment. All backtests, simulations, and performance figures are hypothetical, are shown for research purposes, and do not indicate future results. Do your own research, understand the risks, and consult a licensed professional where appropriate. Your account, your decisions, your responsibility.

Cashflow Engine · Sheridan, WY · terminal@cashflowengine.io