The Today row

Under "Today" sit seven small cards. They answer the third question a trader opens a platform with — after who am I and what can I open — which is what kind of day is this, and where did I leave off. Every one of them is on screen in every state: a card that vanishes when its data cannot be read is a page that changes shape as you use it.

The seven

• Recent activity — the pages you have been on, newest first.
• Economic calendar — this week’s macro releases.
• Date — the weekday, the month and today’s number.
• Streak — thirty dots for thirty days — see the end of this article.
• VIX Volatility Index — where volatility is sitting.
• Journals — how many entries you have written.
• Accounts — how many trading accounts you have.

Recent activity lists pages, not trades

Each row is an address: the page’s own name and mark, how long ago you were there, and a click that takes you straight back. It shows five, newest first, and one page appears once however often you visit it. It is your way back to whatever you were doing before you came here.

It covers every page in every app, and it survives a reload: the list is kept in this browser, tagged to your account, and dropped when you sign out — so it is never someone else’s history and never gone the next morning. Two pages are left out on purpose. Home itself, because you are reading this on it. And the Settings sections, because "across your apps" is not what Settings is; the command palette reaches those by name instead.

Where two apps have a page with the same name — the Tracker and the Portfolio both have a Calendar, the Portfolio and Affiliate both have a Dashboard — the row names the app as well, so you are never picking between two identical rows. Everything else stays as short as it was.

The same list is the ⌘K palette’s Recents tab, which is the tab it opens on. One record of where you have been, read in two places.

The economic calendar is not your P&L calendar

This one shows scheduled macro releases — the data that moves the sessions you trade — for Monday to Sunday of the current week, bucketed in the timezone saved on your profile. It is the same set of rows the Economic Calendar page renders, cut to four columns: the time, the currency, the impact tier and the event. Clicking any row opens that page. The Tracker’s own calendar, the one made of your daily results, is a different surface entirely.

The header states the window it covers and how many high-impact releases are in it, counted over exactly the rows in the table rather than from a second pass. Where the week holds more releases than one page carries, that figure becomes a floor — "3+ high impact" — rather than an under-count printed as though it were exact.

It has three states, and the last two are deliberately different. A populated week is the table. A week with nothing in it says "Nothing scheduled". A week that could not be read says so instead, with an em dash where the count goes — because "0 high impact" over a week nobody managed to look at is a fabricated fact.

VIX

The CBOE Volatility Index, read from the daily history CBOE publishes itself. It is a settled series, which means the newest figure is normally the last session’s close rather than a live quote — so the card says "Settled" with that session’s date where a trading screen would say "Live". A Live badge is a claim about a connection, and there is no connection here; there is a file that changes once a day.

Under the level and the day’s move sit six figures: the open, high, low and previous close of the latest session, and the high and low of the past year. The timeframe picker offers 1D, 5D, 1M, 6M, YTD and 1Y, and it moves the chart and nothing else — the six figures below belong to the session and to the year whatever window is drawn. Drag along the line, or use the arrow keys, and the big number follows the cursor.

1D and 5D are shown but disabled, with the reason on the control: the source publishes daily closes only. They stay visible rather than being removed because a control that disappears makes you wonder what else moved. Drawing five-minute bars out of a daily close would be inventing sessions that never happened, which is the one thing this card must not do.

The line is drawn in the neutral chart colour rather than in profit green or loss red, on purpose. A rising VIX is not good news or bad news in itself — it is good for a buyer of premium, bad for a seller, and nothing at all to somebody flat.

The two counts

Journals is how many complete journal entries exist, over your whole history and across every account you own. Accounts is how many trading accounts you have. Neither is narrowed by the account picker or the date range, because both answer a question about your account rather than about a window of trading. Neither carries a trend arrow either: a count has no direction to state.

The Streak card is empty for everyone

Thirty dots, six across and five down, with a day count in the header. It is meant to record the days you showed up — and today it does not, for anyone. Alltra keeps one row per sign-in session rather than a record of which days you opened it, so twenty-nine of the thirty dots would have to be invented to fill the grid.

Rather than guess at them, or hide the card and leave you wondering where it went, it draws thirty misses and reads 0 days for everyone. Read it as a placeholder for a record that does not exist yet, not as a judgement on your week. It will start filling the day there is something real behind it, and nothing else on the card will change.