Logging your first trade
2 min readUpdated
How to record a trade by hand, what each field means, and which ones you can safely leave alone.
Importing gets your history in. Logging is what you do going forward, ideally at the moment you take the trade — while the reasoning is still the reasoning and not a reconstruction.
Opening a position
- Use Log Trade from the journal or dashboard.
- Enter the symbol, direction, size, and entry price.
- Set a stop or a target. You only need one — the other is derived from your default risk:reward setting if you leave it blank.
- Pick the strategy this trade belongs to, so it can be compared against its peers later.
- Write the rationale now, before you know how it goes. This is the field that makes the entry worth keeping.
A trade stays open until it has both an exit date and an exit price. Open positions are marked against a current price for unrealised P&L and are excluded from realised statistics, so an unclosed trade never quietly distorts your win rate.
Fields you can stop typing
Several fields prefill from Settings → Preferences, so the common case is a few keystrokes rather than a form:
- Default fees — prefills the fees field rather than starting blank.
- Default direction — whether the form opens on long or short.
- Default risk:reward — used to derive whichever of stop or target you left empty.
- Metric display — whether figures across the app read in dollars or in R.
Closing the position
Close a position from its row in the journal or portfolio. You supply the exit date and price; the return in dollars, in percent, and in R, plus the realised risk:reward, are all computed from what you already entered. None of it is stored — it is recalculated every time, so correcting an entry price fixes every figure that depended on it.
After the trade
Open the trade's detail view and add what only exists in hindsight: the lesson, whether you broke a rule and which one, and a chart screenshot if you are on Pro. Tagging a rule-break honestly is what makes the discipline metrics mean anything — a journal that only records the trades you are proud of measures your memory, not your trading.