Risk and results disclosures

Everything on flash.me.uk is general information and education about what one piece of software does. It is not financial, investment, legal or tax advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, fund, currency or crypto asset. Nothing here takes your goals, finances or risk tolerance into account.

Paper Desk and its operator are not registered as an adviser, dealer, broker or portfolio manager with the Alberta Securities Commission or any other Canadian securities regulator, the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO), the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, FINRA, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Futures Association or any other regulator. The site doesn't hold money, manage accounts or place trades for anyone.

Before making investment decisions, talk to a registered professional who knows your situation.

• You can lose some or all of the money you trade. Only trade money you can afford to lose.
• Prices can jump past a stop (for example overnight or on news), so a loss can be bigger than planned. Leveraged funds and options can lose value very quickly.
• Short-term and automated trading has costs (commissions, spreads, slippage, currency conversion and tax) that add up and can turn a small edge into a loss.
• Automated systems add their own risks: software bugs, bad or late data, lost connections, broker outages and orders that fill late, partly or not at all.
• Limits, kill switches and confirmations reduce some risks. They don't remove them.

The Strategies page and the backtest gate show hypothetical (simulated) results: what a set of rules would have done on past prices. No money was traded to get them. Hypothetical results have real limits, and you should read them with those limits in mind:

• They're made with hindsight. The rules are designed and tuned knowing what past prices did, even when the final score comes from a stretch of data the rules weren't tuned on.
• Many rule sets are tested and the best are shown first. When you test enough ideas, some look good by luck alone, so the best result in a table usually overstates what to expect.
• Trading costs, slippage and fills are estimated, not observed. Real orders can fill at worse prices, or not at all, especially in fast or thin markets.
• A simulation feels no pressure. Nobody is tempted to override it or stop it after a run of losses, which is exactly when real trading gets hard.
• Results depend on the historical data used, which comes from third parties and can contain gaps or errors. Some funds have only a few years of history, which may not include a crash or a long bear market.
• A small number of trades says very little. A good average over a handful of trades is mostly luck.

No representation is made that any account will or is likely to achieve profits or losses similar to those shown. In fact, there are often sharp differences between hypothetical results and the results later achieved by real trading.

Paper trades are placed in a broker's practice account with simulated money. The broker's practice system decides the fills, and they can be kinder than a real market: no real queue, no real price impact, and no real money at stake. Paper results are useful evidence about how the rules behave, but they are still not real results, and they don't show what a real account would have earned.

Public pages never show anyone's real account. Where a page shows a record, profit and loss, win rate or a comparison with the market, the figures are either labelled as sample figures (made up to show the layout) or come from demo paper trades. Don't read them as anyone's performance.

Past results, whether backtested, paper or real, don't predict future results. A rule set that passes every test can still lose money afterwards. Passing the backtest gate means a rule set may be tried further, never that it will make money.

The desk can trade real money only for the site's owner, in the owner's own brokerage account, with small fixed limits set in the desk's code. It is not offered to anyone else, and nobody can pay to use it or to change its limits. Any real results are the owner's own and are not shown as a track record for others to follow.

The owner's own desk trades some of the funds that appear on this site (for example QQQ), on paper and possibly with a small amount of real money. It may hold, buy or sell them at any time. Nothing on the site is meant to influence anyone else's trading in them.

Prices, news, movers and other figures come from third parties and are shown for personal, non-commercial use. They can be delayed, incomplete or wrong, and they may change or stop without notice.

Stock prices and news: Finnhub. Market movers: Financial Modeling Prep. Crypto prices: CoinGecko. Treasury yields: the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Overnight rates: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Currencies: Frankfurter. VIX: Cboe. Crypto Fear & Greed Index: Alternative.me. Each provider's name and marks belong to that provider, and none of them endorses this site.

The roadmap and pricing pages describe plans, not commitments. Features, tiers, timing and whether anything is ever offered may change or not happen at all. Nothing on this site is an offer to sell anything.

Questions about these disclosures: use the contact page or call (403) 471-3798. The Terms of Use also cover the risks of live trading.