62 answers about Well Street — the tabs, backtesting, the Terminal, identity and privacy, data, and your account.
Well Street is a community for sharing investment strategies and putting them through a time machine — running them back through decades of real market history to see how they actually would have held up. It brings together research tools, a financial social feed, backtesting, and a free education library. It's a research and analytics platform, not a broker, and it doesn't provide investment advice.
Yes. You can browse the Street feed, read the full Concepts library and glossary, take daily quizzes, run demo backtests, and explore a starter portfolio without an account. Signing up unlocks posting, following, saved watchlists, and keeping your work. Paid plans add more depth — and remove banner ads.
No. Every main tab is open to visitors. You can even edit the starter portfolio in the Terminal — changes persist in your browser. Signing in is what makes things permanent and personal.
No. Well Street doesn't execute trades and never asks for brokerage credentials. It's a place to research, test, and discuss — what you do with your actual brokerage is entirely yours.
If you're new to investing, start with the Concepts library — 60+ plain-English guides from first principles to quantitative strategy. If you already know your way around markets, head to the Street to see what the community is sharing, or the Well to start researching.
Yes — wellst.com works in any browser, and the Well Street app brings the same experience to iOS and Android.
The Well is your research desk — watchlists, custom charts, ticker deep-dives, screeners, and custom AI-generated dashboards powered by Poster. It's the first tab because it's where the things you're studying live.
The Street is the social feed: market news, analysis, shared ideas and backtest results from the community — plus Shorts, short-form investing videos you can scroll through, and Word on the Street for what's being talked about.
The time machine. Define a strategy and run it back through decades of point-in-time market history to see how it would have performed — graded on performance and confidence. See our Methodology pages for exactly how the simulation works.
Your personal portfolio tracker — holdings, live performance, attribution, and a trade journal. It's also where your daily buy and sell signals land.
Community rooms for real-time discussion — talk earnings, macro, and rotations as they happen.
A marketplace to buy and sell anything investing-related — including whatever you create on Well Street or Poster.
Poster is the page-builder behind Well Street. Boards, dashboards, and custom pages are built from cards you can arrange and customize — it's how the platform stays flexible, and how you can build pages of your own.
A backtest runs a set of trading rules against historical market data to see how they would have performed. It's evidence about the past — the strategy's growth, its worst stretches, and its consistency — computed instead of guessed.
Most tools test one rule on one stock, which is easy to game. Well Street simulates at the portfolio level: multiple assets, position sizing, scheduled rebalancing, and portfolio-wide metrics. A portfolio is what you'd actually hold, so that's what gets tested.
Data as it was actually known on each historical date — original filings rather than restatements, and the full universe of stocks that existed then, including ones that later failed. It's the difference between a time machine and a highlight reel.
When a backtest accidentally uses information that wasn't available yet — like trading on earnings numbers before they were filed. It quietly manufactures returns out of hindsight. Point-in-time data is how Well Street keeps it out.
Testing only on companies that survived to today, which skips most of history's disasters. Honest testing includes the full universe as it stood on each date — delisted failures included.
Growth and risk together: total return and CAGR alongside volatility, Sharpe ratio, and maximum drawdown. Either side alone can mislead — the pairing is the point.
The worst peak-to-trough fall along the way. Two strategies can post the same return while one fell 20% at its worst and the other fell 55% — and a 55% loss needs a 122% gain just to recover. Drawdown tells you what the ride would have cost you.
A measure of return per unit of risk: the portfolio's return above a risk-free baseline, divided by its volatility. Higher means more reward for the bumpiness endured. It's covered in depth in the Concepts library.
Tuning a strategy until it fits the past perfectly — which is exactly what makes it fragile in the future. Fewer rules, tested across long periods and different market regimes, deserve more trust than many-parameter strategies that look flawless on one stretch.
Two strategies with the same return can deserve very different trust. Confidence asks the skeptical questions: how long is the evidence, how consistent across periods, how sensitive to the exact parameters? Modest returns with high confidence often beat spectacular returns that survive only in one window.
Yes — demo backtests run on the Backtest tab for everyone. Sign in to build and save your own.
No — and anyone who says otherwise should be approached with caution. A backtest is evidence, not a promise. Markets change and edges decay. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Your holdings, live performance, and attribution — which positions are driving results — plus a trade journal. It's the running record of what you own and how it's doing.
Recording what you did and why, next to what happened. Reviewing your own decisions against outcomes is one of the most underrated habits in investing — the journal makes it routine.
Strategy-driven signals that land in your Terminal. They're information for your own thinking — inputs to consider, never instructions to follow. Nothing on Well Street is investment advice.
A ready-made portfolio every visitor can explore and edit in the Terminal. Your changes persist in your browser; signing in is what saves them for good.
Breaking performance down by cause — which holdings helped, which hurt, and by how much. It turns 'the portfolio is up' into 'here's why.'
Yes. Portfolio data is private by default. Only what you explicitly share is visible to anyone else.
Market news, community analysis, shared ideas and backtest results, and AI-generated explainers — with filter chips for News, Trending, and Learn. It's the town square of Well Street.
Short-form investing videos you scroll through vertically — quick strategy explainers, market moments, and education, right inside the Street.
A live pulse of what the community is talking about — the words and topics moving through the feed right now.
Sign in, then share analysis, ideas, or backtest results from the Street. Posts carry your Public identity — or your Secret one, if you'd rather speak anonymously.
Every post and profile has in-app controls to report or block. We have zero tolerance for abusive content — reports are reviewed and acted on promptly.
Yes, and it's labeled. AI-generated explainers and market summaries are marked as such wherever they appear. Community posts are always the opinions of the people who wrote them.
Every member gets two identities: a Public one for building a reputation, and a Secret one for anonymous, candid participation. Money talk gets more honest when you can choose how attributable it is.
No. Activity under your Secret identity is never linked to your Public identity — not on your profile, not in the feed, not anywhere visible to other members.
Fully. Secret means unattributed, not unaccountable — abusive behavior is moderated the same way regardless of which identity it comes from.
Your portfolio data, saved strategies, and personal information are private by default. Only what you explicitly share is visible to others. Full details in our Privacy Policy.
Build watchlists, chart anything, deep-dive any ticker, screen across 1,500+ fields, and assemble custom AI-generated dashboards with Poster. It's the research desk — arranged your way.
Dashboards for yourself, written-up pages that explain a thesis with live data attached, and polished pages worth sharing or selling in the Market. You describe the view you want; Poster assembles it. No code needed.
Yes. Upload or connect your own datasets and join them with market data — your numbers next to point-in-time fundamentals and prices. Questions only you can ask get answered on pages only you could build.
No. Poster's dashboards are AI-assembled from your description. Your job is knowing what you want to see — which is the interesting part anyway.
Add the tickers you follow and the Well keeps them in front of you, alongside the metrics you care about. Sign in to keep watchlists across devices.
Anything investing-related — including dashboards, pages, and research created on Well Street with Poster. Browse freely; signing in lets you buy, sell, and save favorites.
Yes — Poster-built pages and dashboards are exactly the kind of creation people trade in the Market. Show what the page does honestly, and remember nothing you publish is investment advice.
Public rooms for real-time discussion — earnings days, macro events, sector rotations. Jump into a conversation as it's happening.
Yes — the Street, the Floor, the Market, both identities. Same rules, same moderation, everywhere on Well Street.
Licensed, established third-party market-data providers covering US and Canadian equities and ETFs — decades of end-of-day history, fundamentals, analyst estimates, filings, and macro series. Over 1,500 fields are available across the platform.
Quotes update intraday during market hours; end-of-day history finalizes after each session; fundamentals arrive as companies file. Splits and dividends are applied so long-run charts and backtests stay consistent.
A free, plain-English education library — 60+ chapters from first principles (what a stock is) to advanced quantitative topics (factor investing, Kelly sizing, market microstructure). Every chapter has its own page, free for everyone.
116 financial terms and metrics defined in plain English, with formulas where they apply. Every field you can screen or chart on Well Street is documented there.
Public documentation of how Well Street computes what it shows you — how the backtester simulates, why the data is point-in-time, and how every metric is defined. Plainly, with the limits included.
Ads keep Well Street free. Most are finance-relevant, paid plans remove banner ads, and you can turn ad surfaces off in Settings.
Only if you accept cookies for advertising in the consent banner. Decline — or make no choice — and we request non-personalized ads instead. Either way, the site works the same. The mobile apps don't show third-party web ads or track you across other apps.
Deeper research and backtesting capacity, and banner ads are removed. The Pricing page has the current breakdown — and the free tier stays genuinely useful; that's the point.
Choose Sign in, then sign up with your email address or Google account. Verify your email and you're in.
Yes — visit the Account Deletion page or contact us, and your personal data, posts, and saved content will be permanently removed.
No. Backtest results, screener matches, signals, posts, and AI content are information for your own thinking — not recommendations tailored to you. Well Street is not a registered investment advisor or broker-dealer. Consult a qualified professional before making investment decisions.
The Contact page reaches the team directly, or email contact@wellst.com. We read everything.