Keeping a journal

The Journal’s unit is a DAY, not a trade. It shows the days you traded as cards in three lanes, and each card opens a page you write on. The reasoning for a specific trade lives on that trade instead, which is a different surface, and the last section here says where.

The three lanes

• To Journal: a day you traded and have not written up.
• Drafts: started, not finished.
• Logged: a complete entry.

A card’s lane is derived from the entry’s state rather than stored, so it cannot drift. All three lanes are always drawn, even on a board with nothing in it, an empty board tells you so in a banner above them rather than by replacing the structure you are about to fill. The board covers the last ninety days.

The four figures above it

• Journals: complete entries in the period, plus the pages you have written in. A page you made with New page counts once, on the day you made it, after you first edit it, so a page started from a template is not counted until you write in it, and a page left blank never is. Drafts are not counted, a draft is debt rather than progress.
• Streak: consecutive TRADING days with a complete entry, counting back from your most recent trading day. Weekends and holidays do not break it, because they are not failures to journal, a streak that resets every Monday is a metric nobody trusts. It breaks on the first day you traded and did not write up.
• Insights: shows an em dash, for everybody. It has no definition anywhere in the product yet, and printing a zero would be inventing one. It fills in when it means something.
• Unjournaled: traded days with no complete entry. Its trend is inverted on purpose, a falling count renders as good news, because fewer unjournaled days is a better week.

Opening a day

Tap a card and you land on that day’s page. Opening one costs nothing, a day nobody has written yet simply opens blank and the entry is created the first time you save, so browsing the board to read old days does not litter it with empty drafts. “New entry” is the one control that creates up front, and pressing it twice gives you the entry you already had rather than a second one.

Sort the board newest or oldest first, days are the atomic unit, so date is the only thing there is to sort on, and filter it by the day’s outcome (winning, losing, break-even) or by the instruments traded. When a filter is on, the board says so above the lanes, because a filter is only honest if the page admits it is applied.

The entry page

A writing surface, and a styling panel you open from the Editor button in the bar above it, driving the same live document. A day is one entry, but it can run to several pages, and the controls for that sit on the paper itself: an arrow floats over each side margin to turn the page, and the bottom-right corner reads the page you are on out of the total, the way a book prints a folio. The button beside that number opens Add page and Delete page, and deleting a page you have written on asks first. Alt with an arrow key flips without leaving the keyboard. The day’s figures are not put in front of you here — you can insert a Performance block from the “/” menu if you want them beside the writing, but the full read is the Reports page for the same day, and keeping the two apart is deliberate, you write first and read second.

The bar across the top carries the day, the entry’s state, undo and redo, a share-and-export menu (copy as Markdown, download a .md, copy as plain text, print), a full-screen toggle, the toggle that marks it complete, and Delete. Marking an entry complete is what moves its card from Drafts to Logged and what the Streak counts.

Notes, tags and screenshots go on the TRADE

This is the part most people look for in the wrong place. A day’s entry is prose about the session; what you thought about one position belongs to that position, so it lives in the trade’s own panel, open a row in the Trades table and its slideout has three tabs, one of which is Notes & tags.

• Notes: free text on the trade, saved against the trade.
• Tags: the labels you put on a trade, the setup you took, the mistake you made. Assigned from the same panel, from your own vocabulary, and shown in the Trades table’s Tags column.
• A setup chart: one image attached to the trade, PNG, JPEG or WebP, up to 10 MB, with a full-size view when you click it.

That split is what makes the record readable later: a note and a tag belong to one position, so a month in you can sort the Trades table, read a run of trades back, and see what one way of trading actually did. A day’s prose cannot be read that way, and a tag on a day cannot tell you which trade it was about. Narrowing the table itself is the Strategy facet’s job today, the Filters popover has no tag section.

A habit that survives a bad week

1. 1Write at the close: the day is still whole then. Reconstructed a week later, it is fiction, and you will know it while you are typing.
2. 2Then open the day’s report: it is the Reports page for the same date. Second rather than first, on purpose, the numbers are very good at telling you what you should have felt.
3. 3Mark it complete: an entry left in Drafts counts against you twice, it is not in Journals and the day is still in Unjournaled.