Designing a tag set

Tags are how a trade becomes findable later: the setup you took, the mistake you made, the condition you were in. They are grouped into categories so the trade panel can offer them a handful at a time rather than as one long list, and the categories are yours to define.

How the manager works

• The vocabulary is shown, not hidden — each category is a titled group with its colour, its count and its tags rendered as the real coloured pills. Seeing them is the management surface.
• Rename and recolour are one editor — two entry points into the same inline form, because a category’s name and its colour are one thing and editing them in two places is two chances to leave one half-done.
• Deleting a category asks first — it takes the whole tag set with it and there is no undo. It is the one action here that cannot be walked back.
• The header counts what you are editing — categories and tags, read from the same vocabulary below it, so it moves as you type.

Five rules for a set that survives

1. 1Start with five, not fifty — a handful you apply every day beats twenty you abandon in a fortnight. An unused tag is worse than no tag, because it makes the ones you do use look incomplete.
2. 2Name the decision, not the verdict — “chased”, “moved my stop” and “traded the open” are things you can count. “bad discipline” is a conclusion, and a month of trades tagged with a conclusion tells you only what you already believed.
3. 3One question per category — Setups answers what you took; Mistakes answers what went wrong. A category holding both cannot be read as a column, because two tags on one trade would be answering different questions.
4. 4Add a tag the second time you notice something — not the first, and never in advance. A taxonomy designed before the trades exist is a guess about which distinctions will matter, and it is usually wrong about most of them.
5. 5Accept that it starts today — a vocabulary invented in June cannot be applied to March honestly — you no longer remember those trades well enough, and a tag applied from memory is a tag you will later treat as evidence.

Where a tag shows up

• On the trade itself, in the Trade Details panel’s Notes & tags tab, which is where you assign them.
• As a Tags column on the Trades table, which you can switch on from the Columns menu.
• In the trade panel’s picker, which offers the vocabulary saved against your account.

There is no tag filter on the Trades page yet. Its search box covers the symbol, the notes, the strategy and the setup, and its filter popover offers symbol, strategy, result, direction and a P&L range — so a tag is something you read on a row today, not something you narrow a month down to. That is the capability the vocabulary work is heading toward, and it is worth tagging now so there is something to narrow when it lands.