> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.vole.bot/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# What-If

> [!NOTE]
>
> This screen is part of the Vole Bot package.

The **What-If** panel lives on an instance's detail page, next to Edge Lens. It's a scratchpad for asking "what if we'd used different settings?" against that instance's own recent closed trades — without touching your live bot in any way. It never changes a live setting and never places an order; it only calculates and shows you the result.

## Opening it

Open an instance's detail page and find the What-If panel. Set **Last N trades** — how many of the instance's most recent closed trades to look back over. The instance needs at least that many closed trades for the panel to have anything to work with.

## Parameter sweep

Open the **Parameter sweep** tab (one of a couple of modes at the top of the panel). It holds your execution policy fixed and scans different values for the strategy's own signal settings — the exact settings vary by strategy — across that same window of trades.

You can optionally set custom ranges for one or more settings to narrow what gets scanned; leave it blank for a quick scan around your current values.

Press **Run What-If** — it only runs when you ask it to, not on a timer. A counter shows how many backtests it's about to run.

### Reading the results

You get one row per configuration tested, with standard trade figures: net P\&L, win rate, reward-to-risk, and profit factor. Each row is also split into a part the scan tuned itself against and a part it didn't — a configuration that only looks good on the first part is a warning sign, not a discovery worth acting on.

## Confidence signals — read these first

Before trusting any row of numbers, check the panel's confidence signal:

| Signal | What it means |
| - | - |
| **Calibrated** | Re-running your current live settings through this same tool lines up closely with what your account actually did — the comparison is trustworthy. |
| **Mismatch** | It doesn't line up closely enough, usually because part of your setup can't be fully modeled outside the live bot. Treat these numbers as directional only. |
| **No baseline** | Not enough market history to compare against. |
| **Low sample** | Too few trades for the result to be statistically meaningful. |

> [!WARNING]
>
> What-If is an estimate, not a replay of exactly what would have happened.
> When you see a mismatch or a low-sample flag alongside an interesting
> result, treat the difference as worth a closer look, not as proof.

## Limits

* Needs a minimum amount of closed-trade history to run at all.
* Works for both Binance and IB instances.
* It's a close approximation of live behavior, built on the same backtest engine used elsewhere in vole.bot — not an exact, bar-for-bar replay of your live bot. That's exactly what the confidence signals above are for.


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