Glossary · Performance analytics

What is closing line value?

Closing line value (CLV) measures whether the market price moved in a trader’s favour after the trade. It is not a promise of profit; it is a way to inspect the quality of the price someone took before the result was known.

The short version

Imagine a trader buys an outcome at a 40% implied probability. If the market later moves to 50% before the event starts, the trader captured a better price than the market’s closing view. That ten-point move is the basic intuition behind positive CLV.

SharpRoster publishes CLV alongside return, record, and sample size because those measures answer different questions. Return tells you what happened to the position. CLV tells you whether the entry price was respected by the market afterward.

How SharpRoster calculates it

For a buy, the calculation is the closing price divided by the entry price, minus one. For a sell, SharpRoster uses the complementary probability because selling one outcome is economically equivalent to buying the other side.

buy at p, close at c   →   clv = c / p − 1
sell at p, close at c  →   clv = (1 − c) / (1 − p) − 1

The close is anchored to the authoritative event start rather than an arbitrary time chosen after the fact. Fills made at or after the event starts receive no CLV because there is no pre-event closing line to compare against.

What CLV does—and does not—tell you

It can tell you

Whether entries were generally better than the later market price.
Whether a return has a supporting process signal.
Where a capper’s measured edge appears to live over time.

It cannot tell you

Whether the next position will win.
Whether positive CLV overcame fees or execution costs.
Whether a small sample is enough to rank a record.

That last limit matters. SharpRoster withholds figures below its published sample floor and shows confidence context where it is available. A clean metric with a tiny denominator is still weak evidence.

Common questions

Is positive CLV the same as profit?

No. CLV measures the quality of the entry price relative to the later market price. A position can show positive CLV and still lose, while a profitable position can have negative CLV.

Why does SharpRoster use CLV?

Return is noisy and can take a long time to separate from luck. CLV is an earlier signal that the market moved toward the price a trader took, so it helps put a return in context.

When is CLV withheld?

SharpRoster withholds CLV when the sample is too small, the fill happened after the event began, or there is no reliable price observation near the authoritative event start.

Want to see the metric in context? Browse the live roster or read the full methodology, including the sample gates and market-maker filter.