Eighty percent in three days: reading the concentration number

Updated 2026-09-24. The Waka Waka example was removed because its audit belongs to a retired test world.

Every audit prints one line that readers quote more often than any other. It reads like 80% of profit made in 3 days, and it looks like a verdict on how bursty a strategy is. Across the audit set of 3 September the count ran from 3 days to 452 days, and the same low number turns out to have two opposite meanings. One of them is the finding people expect. The other one is a warning about the size of the profit, not about its timing. Telling them apart takes one extra number, and it is printed on the same page.

How the number is built

The detector groups closed trades by exit day, sorts the days best first, and counts until they reach 80% of the final net result. It then divides that count by active days. The lamp is caution below 8% and red below 3%. A thin final result makes a few good days look dominant, so the count only makes sense next to the net.

What that does to a thin result

Lizard closed trades on 4,242 days between 2003.05.05 and 2026.08.16 and finished at 183.99 USD net. Its three best days are 2025-12-18 with 75.57 USD, 2025-11-28 with 61.94 and 2026-05-12 with 58.04. Those three sum to 195.55 USD, which is more than the entire net of the run. The audit prints 80% of profit made in 3 days. That is 0.1% of 4242 trading days. and lights the lamp red. For scale, the worst single day of the same run cost 56.58 USD.

Every part of that is correct, and it is still not a statement about bursts. It is a statement about twenty three years of trading that netted less than three good days. Note also where those three days fall. All of them sit inside the last nine months of a run that started in 2003.

Same lamp, different risk

All three sit below the red threshold. The table shows why the lamp is a prompt to inspect the audit, not a verdict by itself.

So Lizard and Gold Atlas carry the same lamp colour for reasons that have nothing in common. That is the whole point of this article. Read the count next to the net.

Where the number is missing on purpose

On 3 September three audits carried no concentration figure at all. Logan finished at -24,334.65 USD, Scalping Robot Pro at -53,234.68 USD and Smart Gold Hunter at -1,418.55 USD. When a run ends below its deposit there is no profit to concentrate, so the field is empty rather than zero. Those three were exactly the three default audits with a negative net result, which is the cleanest way to see what the metric depends on.

The upper end of the scale

At the other extreme the result is spread out. CryonX needs 452 of 3,191 days (14.2%), Quantum Athena X needs 254 of 902 (28.2%) and Quantum Queen X needs 258 of 820 (31.5%). A spread result is a different property from a good one, and the audits keep those questions apart. Quantum Queen X carries an ok concentration lamp and red lamps for data quality and structure in the same document.

Run these checks yourself

• Put the count next to the net result. A count of 3 on a net of 183.99 USD and a count of 54 on a net of 8,239.71 USD produce the same lamp and are not the same finding.
• Compare shares, not raw counts. Lizard's 3 days sit in 4,242 active days. A raw count only means something against its own total, and the share puts every audit on the same scale.
• Ask what being absent costs. A count of N out of M means the result lives in a window you have to be present for. Our own flag text puts the second consequence next to it, that consistency rules at prop firms punish exactly this profile.

The concentration figure for every audited EA sits on its audit page with the deal level evidence behind it. Your own tester report? The browser check is free.