# Frequently asked questions

> Pricing, advice, trading, accounts, privacy, deleting, reuse, why results differ from other sites, data, leverage, Discover’s order, and AI assistants.

## Is Tactfolio free?

Yes. The Free plan is free for good: it builds five strategies a day and
backtests each one as often as you like, opens and backtests the classic and
Discover strategies, shows premium ones as backtests, and runs 10 AI assistant backtests a day. Every strategy it
saves is shared with the community on Discover. Plus costs $12 a month or $108
a year and adds unlimited building, private strategies, premium strategies, paper
trading and one live strategy. Pro is $29 a month or $261 a year. Plus and Pro start with a
14-day free trial. See [pricing](https://tactfolio.com/pricing.md).

## Is this investment advice?

No. Tactfolio is a research tool. It shows how rules would have behaved on past
prices. It doesn't recommend what to buy, and past results don't predict future
ones. That includes the classic strategies and everything in Discover: they
are other people's rules, shown honestly, not endorsements.

## Can I trade from Tactfolio?

Yes, on Plus and Pro. A paper account in Trade runs one of your strategies
with pretend money at real market prices and emails you a summary after each close. You can also
connect your own Alpaca account, paper or live, with your own API keys: the
strategy then trades real orders with the part of the account you give it, and
never touches anything else you hold there. See [paper trading](https://tactfolio.com/paper-trading.md)
and [Alpaca trading](https://tactfolio.com/alpaca-trading.md) for how each works.

## Do I need an account?

Not to look around: the builder's starter patterns, the classic strategies,
Discover, and every public strategy's page are open to everyone. You
need a free account to build and save strategies, copy or star public ones,
publish, or connect an AI assistant.

## Who can see my strategies?

Only you, and any AI assistant you connect, until you publish. On the Free
plan, every strategy you save is shared with the community on Discover, so
saving one publishes it. Strategies you kept private before stay private until
you save changes to them. A published strategy's versions are public and
permanent: anyone can view and copy them. Your unpublished changes stay
private even after you've published. See
[Publishing and sharing](https://tactfolio.com/docs/sharing.md).

## Can I delete a strategy?

If you've never published it, yes, from your [workspace](https://tactfolio.com/workspace). A
published strategy can't be deleted, because other people's copies and
strategies may depend on it, but you can retire it from Discover.

## Can I use someone else's strategy?

Yes. Copy any public strategy to your account and change it, or use it as a
building block inside your own with a **Strategy** block. Either way, the
original author keeps the credit. See
[Build on someone else's work](https://tactfolio.com/docs/sharing.md#build-on-someone-elses-work).

## Why are my results different from another backtesting site's?

Small assumptions add up. The usual differences:

- **Trade timing.** Tactfolio trades at the same day's close as its signal.
  Some sites trade the next day instead, which the **Next-day open** line
  approximates.
- **Costs.** Tactfolio charges 5 basis points on every trade, the same for
  every strategy; some sites charge nothing.
- **Sharpe ratio.** Tactfolio's main Sharpe doesn't subtract a risk-free rate.
  Compare other sites' Sharpe with the **over T-bills** figure.
- **Lookbacks.** A "10-month" average can mean ten month-end closes or about
  210 trading days. Tactfolio does both; check which your rule uses.
- **Dividends.** Tactfolio's prices include reinvested dividends. Charts of raw
  prices, such as most broker charts, don't. The
  [dividend calculator](https://tactfolio.com/trading-tools/dividend-calculator.md) shows how much
  reinvesting adds over the years.
- **Dates.** A backtest starts once every ticker and reading has history, which
  may be later than you expect.

## Where do the prices come from?

Tactfolio uses daily prices for US-listed stocks and funds, adjusted for splits
and dividends, and US economic data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
[What a backtest simulates](https://tactfolio.com/docs/backtests.md) covers the data and its limits.

## Can a strategy sell short or use leverage?

It can't sell short or borrow. It can hold leveraged and inverse funds like any
other fund, using their real price history.

## Why does my backtest start later than I asked?

A backtest can only start once every ticker in it has prices and every reading
has enough history to calculate: a 12-month return needs a year of prices
first. For some young funds, the **Simulated history** option extends the
history further back; see [Simulated history](https://tactfolio.com/docs/simulated-history.md).

## How is Discover ordered?

By the Tactfolio Score, from 1 to 100. It discounts what a backtest may owe
to hindsight, then compares every public strategy on expected risk-adjusted
return, growth, and return for its drawdowns: 100 means no other strategy is
expected to beat it on all three. See
[How the Tactfolio Score works](https://tactfolio.com/docs/concepts/tactfolio-score.md).

## Which AI assistants work with Tactfolio?

Any assistant that supports remote MCP servers with OAuth sign-in. Setup steps
for the ones we've checked are in
[Use Tactfolio from your AI assistant](https://tactfolio.com/docs/mcp.md).

## I created an account but can't sign in. Why?

Open the link we emailed you when you signed up: it finishes creating your
account and signs you in. Until then, signing in says the email or password is
wrong. No email? Check your spam folder, or choose **Resend link** on the
page that asked you to check your email (signing up again with the same address
works too).

## I forgot my password. How do I get back in?

Choose **Forgot password?** on the [sign-in page](https://tactfolio.com/login) and enter your
account's email. We send a link that works once, for one hour; the new password
you choose with it signs you out on your other devices. If no email arrives,
check your spam folder, or write to us from [Support](https://tactfolio.com/support). To change a
password you know, use [Settings](https://tactfolio.com/account).

## How do I get help or report a problem?

Write to us from [Support](https://tactfolio.com/support): it's in the main menu, and you don't need
to be signed in. Members see their requests and our replies there; everyone
gets our reply by email.

## Learn the ideas behind it

- [Backtesting](https://tactfolio.com/learn/backtesting-explained.md): What backtesting is, how to backtest a trading strategy step by step, the biases that fool people, and why out-of-sample testing matters.
