Calendar
Your trade journal's home base. Every trade you import lives here, organised by day, with your running stats always visible.
Every bold date on the calendar has trades logged against it. Click any date to see the full breakdown for that day — every execution, gross and net P&L, and the notes you've written. The stat cards along the top update automatically as you select different dates: day, week, month, and year figures side by side, so you're never just looking at one number in isolation.
Four ways to get trades in
TradeGrade isn't built around any one broker. IBKR gets automatic format detection since it's common among momentum traders, but every path below works regardless of who you trade through.
Paste your execution log
Paste a tab-separated list — Time, Symbol, Action, Qty, Price, Commission — into the Import box. This matches Interactive Brokers TWS's paste format out of the box; if your platform exports executions in the same column order, it'll work too.
Import from CSV
Upload a CSV file. IBKR Activity Statement exports are detected and parsed automatically. On any other broker, export to TradeGrade's own generic format instead — Date, Time, Symbol, Side, Qty, Price, P&L, Commission — the same structure "Export Period CSV" produces, so it's already proven to re-import cleanly.
Screenshot Import
Drop or paste a screenshot of your broker's execution log — genuinely broker-agnostic. AI reads the image and extracts the trade data, which makes this the most reliable option if you're not on IBKR and don't want to reformat a CSV by hand.
Daily Notes
Free-text notes per day. These feed into "Review My Progress" on the AI Analysis tab as qualitative context — write what the numbers can't show.
Dashboard
The pattern-recognition layer. Where Calendar shows you individual days, Dashboard shows you the shape of your trading over time.
- Weekly Target sits at the top for a reason — it's tied to whichever week you last selected on the Calendar, and tracks your red-day count against your configured cap, not just a raw dollar figure. Red days are the lever that actually matters here, not the total.
- Rolling Win Rate smooths out single-day noise — the blue line is your trailing win rate over your chosen trade window (10/20/30/50), plotted against your overall win rate as a reference.
- Hold Time (Winners vs Losers) is one of the most honest charts in the app. If your losers are held longer than your winners, that's the single clearest tell of a discipline problem — and it's staring right at you here, not buried in a spreadsheet.
- Performance by Hour / Day of Week / Month — these exist to catch patterns you can't see day-to-day: a bad Tuesday habit, a specific hour where your edge disappears, a slow bleed across a whole month.
Reports
Where Dashboard shows trends, Reports lets you interrogate a specific period — and ends with the single number that ties the whole app together.
Use the period buttons (30D / 60D / 90D / 180D / All) and the Daily / Weekly / Monthly granularity toggle to zoom in or out on exactly the window you want to review. Win/Loss Distribution buckets your trades by size in $5 increments near zero, widening further out — so you can see at a glance whether your losses cluster tightly (good sign) or have a long ugly tail (worth investigating).
Session Tracker
The only tab you should have open while you're actually trading. Everything else in TradeGrade is review — this is real-time.
- Start the Session Timer before your first trade. The banner at the top ("Continue Session" / caution / stop) mirrors your real-time rule status and updates the instant you enter a trade.
- Log each trade in Trade P&L as you close it — a new box appears automatically. Tag the emotion(s) you felt on that specific trade from the dropdown next to it; this is what powers the emotional trend tracking later.
- Tick checkpoints as they become relevant — see below, this is worth understanding properly.
- Use the Cooldown timer after every loss. Its duration is the one setting that stays editable all session, even while everything else is locked — because how long you need to reset can genuinely change trade to trade.
- End & Log when you're done. This is what actually saves the session, feeds it into Session History, and makes it available for AI Analysis.
Every widget, what it actually does
The layout above is just one arrangement — every card here can be moved or hidden via Edit Layout. What each one does stays the same regardless of where you put it.
Daily Identity Declaration
Write and speak one sentence defining yourself as a trader, before you look at a single chart. This exists because willpower fails under pressure but identity is harder to abandon mid-trade — "I don't do that" holds up better in the moment than "I shouldn't do that."
Trade P&L
Enter each trade's result as you close it — negative numbers for losers. Each entry has its own emotion tag dropdown right next to it, multi-select, so one trade can carry more than one tagged feeling if that's honest.
Capital Deployed
A separate widget, but linked to Trade P&L one-for-one — box 3 here corresponds to trade 3 above. This is what your Volume Cap is actually measured against, not your P&L entries.
Live Metrics
Current P&L, Return on Capital, Drawdown from Peak, and Session Discipline — the same weighted score used everywhere else in the app, calculated live as you trade rather than only after you log.
Loss Checkpoints + Cooldown
Tick milestones as you hit them, and start the cooldown timer after every loss — see below for exactly what's required versus optional here, and why cooldown is the one exception to the lock.
Profit Checkpoints
Includes the Green-Day Continuation Exception — tick it only when a trade past your cap was genuine continuation on an already-profitable symbol at normal size, not a fresh speculative position. The AI verifies this against your actual trade data rather than trusting the tick.
Discomfort Log
The hardest moment you felt an urge to break a rule, and what you actually did instead. This is the one piece of Session Tracker data that feeds into "Review My Progress" on the AI Analysis tab as qualitative context.
Active Warnings & Triggers
A live readout, not a summary — green means everything's within limits right now, amber means you're approaching a limit, red means a hard limit has already been breached. The banner at the top of the page always mirrors whatever this card says.
Objective vs. discretionary checkpoints
This distinction is the whole point of how checkpoints are graded, so it's worth understanding rather than just clicking boxes.
| Checkpoint | Type | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Hit daily loss limit → Session over | Objective | Tied to a real number. Flagged if missed. |
| Hit profit target → Consider stopping | Objective | Tied to your configured profit target. Flagged if missed. |
| Gave back 20%+ of peak gains → Tighten stops | Objective | Tied to your actual configured giveback %. Flagged if missed. |
| Loss #1 / #2 / #3 → Take a break, etc. | Discretionary | A judgment call. Never flagged as missed, whether ticked or not. |
| First green trade → Size down | Discretionary | A judgment call. Never flagged as missed, whether ticked or not. |
What locks once the timer starts, and what doesn't
Session Tracker deliberately prevents you from quietly loosening your own rules mid-session. Once the timer is running:
| Locked while trading | Stays editable |
|---|---|
| All Trading Rules values (caps, limits, targets) | Cooldown duration — the one exception |
| Adding, editing, or removing any checkpoint | Trade P&L / Capital Deployed entries |
| — locked buttons show "Locked during session" | Identity Declaration, Discomfort Log, Notes |
Cooldown duration is exempt on purpose — the right length genuinely varies trade to trade. A bigger loss or a hotter emotional state might call for longer than your default; a minor slip might not need the full window. Everything else stays fixed once you've committed to it, specifically so a bad moment mid-session can't talk you into redefining your own limits.
Trading Rules — every setting, and what it actually controls
Click "Customise" on the Trading Rules card to set these. They're the numbers every other part of the app — Live Metrics, Active Warnings, the Discipline Score — is measured against.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Trade Target / Trade Hard Cap | Target is a soft amber warning to wind down. Hard Cap is a red stop signal. |
| Volume Target / Volume Hard Cap | Same soft/hard pattern, measured against Capital Deployed, not P&L. |
| Max Shares Per Trade | Maximum position size for any single trade. |
| Daily Loss Limit | Red stop signal — and the single biggest factor in your Discipline Score (worth 40 of 100 points, graded by how far over you go). |
| Profit Target | An amber nudge to consider locking in gains — not a hard stop. |
| Max Duration | Minutes on the countdown timer. |
| Giveback % Trigger | The % of peak P&L given back that triggers a red stop. |
| Giveback Activation Threshold | Your peak must reach this dollar amount first — stops the rule firing on tiny early gains. |
| Min Loss Before Giveback | The minimum dollar amount given back before the rule can fire at all. |
| Giveback Warning % | An earlier amber heads-up, before the red trigger point. |
| Weekly Target ($) | A reference line on the weekly chart — evaluated at week's end, not paced day by day. |
| Weekly Red-Day Cap | The real weekly discipline target — how many red days you're allowed before the week itself goes amber or red. The dollar figure is secondary to this. |
Session History, at the bottom of Session Tracker, is where every logged session lives. Select a date to see the full detail: score, checkpoint compliance, and — if you filled them in — your Daily Identity Declaration and Discomfort Log for that session.
Editing a session after the fact
Mistakes happen after you've already logged — a wrong number, a missed checkpoint tick. Click Edit on any session in Session History and it loads back into the live tracker exactly as it was originally entered, page scrolled to the top automatically.
AI Analysis
The tool's actual thesis: grading your process, not your P&L — with real pushback when the two disagree.
- Select a trading day. The "Derived from Journal" and "Session Tracker" cards populate automatically — this is exactly what gets sent to the AI, so you always know what it's working from.
- Write a self-assessment (optional, but worth doing). This is where the AI's honesty actually shows up — if you write "I stayed disciplined today" and the data shows a rule breach, it will say so directly, not politely agree with you.
- Upload chart screenshots (optional). Hold the crosshair over your key level — HOD, entry zone, pivot — with price and time visible, for the most useful read.
- Click Analyse This Session.
A finished report always follows the same structure: a Verdict with a letter grade, 5 Positives — genuine ones only, never padded to hit the number — and Areas for Improvement, both grounded in specific numbers from your actual session, not generic advice. Below that: a full Rules Compliance pass/fail table, a Discipline Trend comparing your recent sessions to your earlier ones, and a Self-Assessment Check that directly compares what you wrote against what the data says.