Trading Journal

The Journal is where the loop closes. Every trade you take, every setup you tag, every R you log, every screenshot you save lands in one server-of-record, scored by a single unified stats engine that is account-size agnostic — a $2,000 account and a $2M account are graded on the same risk-normalized curve. The same engine powers the Dashboard, the Reports, the Tape Score, and the per-Playbook breakdowns, so no two numbers in the Journal can ever disagree with each other. Built for traders who measure expectancy weekly and treat the log as a behavior diagnostic, not a tax artifact.

What it is

A six-tab journal living at /journal/:tab:

• Dashboard — the headline KPIs, equity curve, auto-generated insights, and your Tape Score.
• Trade Log — the row-level log with add/edit-in-place, setup tagging, grades, notes, screenshots, an intraday chart per trade, a per-trade AI review, and a share button.
• Reports — 11 analytics reports sliced every way that matters.
• Calendar — a monthly P&L heatmap you can click into to filter the log.
• Playbooks — rule-defined setups that score your adherence and roll up per-setup performance.
• AI Analysis — pattern recognition plus weekly and monthly summaries over your closed trades.

The flagship is the Tape Score — a single 0-100 grade with an A-F letter that answers "how good is my process, really?" in one number, comparable across accounts of any size.

When to use it

After every session — log the fills (or let the simulator auto-log them), tag the setup, assign a Playbook, grade your execution, and write one daily entry on what worked. Weekly — open Reports, read the Mistake Cost report and exit-efficiency, and prune the leaks. Monthly — check whether your Tape Score letter moved and which of the five drivers is dragging it. See /trade-journal for the broader case for journaling, and /compare/tradervue-alternative for how this stacks up.

Open it

• Path: /journal/:tab — /journal/dashboard, /journal/log, /journal/reports, /journal/calendar/2026-06, /journal/playbooks, /journal/ai.
• Shortcut: ⌘7 — or open it from the §TRADE group at the top of the sidebar (next to the Simulator). The Journal is free to open — Free gives you the Trade Log, Dashboard, and Calendar.
• A period selector in the header (Week / Month / Last Month / Quarter / Year / All) re-scopes every tab, and [ EXPORT_PDF ] prints a clean, print-ready report for the selected period with a tapeboard.com footer and page numbers.
• Tier-gate: Free gets Trade Log (20 trades/month shown), Dashboard, Calendar, and CSV import, all computed over a rolling 10-trade sample. Pro ($39) unlocks every tab, unlimited history, and the journal AI coach. Terminal ($79) adds CSV/JSON bulk export.

The six tabs

Tab	URL	What it does	Tier
Dashboard	/journal/dashboard	Tape Score, KPI hero strip, equity curve, auto-insights, day/hour breakdowns	Free (10-trade sample)
Trade Log	/journal/log	Add/edit trades, setup/tag/grade, per-trade chart + AI review + share + screenshots	Free (20/mo)
Reports	/journal/reports	11 analytics reports sliced by setup, tag, symbol, hour, day, grade, direction	Pro
Calendar	/journal/calendar/:ym	Monthly P&L heatmap, click a day to filter the log	Free (10-trade sample)
Playbooks	/journal/playbooks	Rule-defined setups + machine-checkable adherence + per-playbook stats	Pro
AI Analysis	/journal/ai	Pattern recognition, weekly + monthly AI summaries	Pro

Dashboard

The Dashboard is the at-a-glance health read, top to bottom:

• Tape Score card — the 0-100 grade and A-F letter (its own deep section below). Sits at the very top.
• KPI hero strip — a large NET_PNL number with an up/down delta vs the prior period, alongside Win Rate, Expectancy ($/trade), and Trades. Each KPI carries its own prior-period delta badge so you can see whether this week beat last week.
• Equity curve — an SVG curve of cumulative equity with the max-drawdown window shaded in red and a fill that turns green or red with your net. It unlocks at 3 closed trading days; below that it shows an "EQUITY CURVE UNLOCKS AT 3 CLOSED TRADING DAYS" placeholder.
• Auto-insights — a strip of plain-English findings tagged EDGE (green), LEAK (red), or NOTE (yellow). They are gated by sample size (most need ≥5 trades in the bucket) and surface things like "Your most profitable hour is 10AM," "Tuesdays are your weakest day," "Your longs make money but your shorts lose," and "You hold losers 2.3× longer than winners — classic anti-pattern." Up to four show at once, each with the basis it was computed from.
• Secondary stats — Avg Winner, Avg Loser, Profit Factor, Best Day, Worst Day, Avg Hold time.
• Goals panel — progress against your trading goals.
• P&L-by-day-of-week and P&L-by-hour bar charts — diverging horizontal bars (green right / red left). These unlock at 10 trades; below that a nudge explains charts off small samples are misleading and are hidden until the data is meaningful.

When the Journal is empty, the Dashboard shows a "NO_TRADES_YET" state with a primary CTA into the paper simulator, a secondary connect-your-broker card, and a ghost preview of the stats that unlock after the first trade.

The Tape Score

The Tape Score is a 0-100 grade plus an A-F letter, computed over the unified stats engine. It is risk-normalized and account-size agnostic — it reads your process, not your bankroll, because every sub-score is a ratio or a normalized metric. Five components, each with a published weight:

Component	Weight	What it measures	Normalization
Profit factor	25%	Gross wins ÷ gross losses	PF 1 ≈ 33, PF 3 ≈ 100 (capped); no losses caps at 100
Expectancy (in R)	25%	Average R-multiple per trade	0R = 50, +1.25R = 100, −1.25R = 0; falls back to the sign of $ expectancy when no trades carry a stop
Win rate	20%	Share of closed trades that are green	Already 0-100
Consistency	15%	Percentage of green trading days	% of days net-positive
Drawdown control	15%	How tightly you contain max drawdown	1 − (max drawdown ÷ peak equity), so it's account-agnostic

The letter grade maps from the composite: A ≥ 85, B ≥ 70, C ≥ 55, D ≥ 40, F < 40.

The score is gated to 30 or more closed real trades (a pure-simulator view uses a lower 10-trade floor, since a paper sandbox can grade quickly) — below the floor there isn't enough signal to grade, and the card shows "Log N more trades to unlock your Tape Score" with a progress bar. Free accounts see the headline number and letter (the marketing hook); Pro unlocks the per-driver breakdown so you can see exactly which of the five components is dragging the grade — each driver shows its raw value (e.g. 2.10x, +0.45R, 62%, 48% peak DD) and its 0-100 sub-score. The full formula, with weights and worked examples, is published at /methodology/tape-score; R-multiple itself is defined at /methodology/r-multiple.

Because the same Tape Score calculation runs over the same engine in the journal and the simulator, a sim trade and a real trade are graded identically — the number can never disagree with itself across surfaces.

Trade Log

The row-level log. Each row shows ticker, direction, P&L, R, and grade; click to expand a trade into its full detail.

Adding or editing a trade captures:

Field	Notes
Ticker	e.g. AAPL
Entry / Exit Price	the fills
Shares	position size
Date	trade date
Direction	long / short
Stop Loss (optional)	drives R-multiple and Playbook risk checks
Commissions	netted out of P&L
Entry / Exit Time	drives hold-time and Playbook time-window checks
Setups	structured selection from your setup list
Playbook	optional assignment that drives adherence scoring
Tags	free-form labels (e.g. pre-market, news-catalyst)
Setup Grade	self-graded execution quality: A+, A, B, C, F
Notes	free text — what you saw, what you'd do differently
Screenshots	attached on entry, displayed in the row-expand

On mobile, a ＋ quick-trade FAB opens the same form.

The expanded trade view stacks, for one trade:

• an auto-rendered intraday chart with your entry and exit marked,
• an on-demand AI review — a pattern read of that single trade,
• a SHARE button (privacy-safe public link — see below),
• and your attached screenshots.

When you open the log filtered to a specific date (via the Calendar), a Daily Notes panel renders above the rows for that day.

Importing real fills:

• CSV import (Free, moved off Pro 2026-07-04): drop a broker export and the parser auto-detects the format across all 10 supported brokers — Fidelity, Schwab, Webull, Robinhood, IBKR, Tradervue, DAS, Sterling, tastytrade, and TradeStation (the newest addition). Fills are paired into round-trip trades automatically.
• Any other broker: an export the parser doesn't recognize opens a column-mapping wizard instead of failing — point Tapeboard's canonical fields (Symbol, Side, Quantity, Price, Date, plus optional Time and Commission) at your file's own columns, using a live preview of your first rows and a running "N trades ready to import" count. Options trades import through the same wizard: map optional Option Type / Strike / Expiry columns, or leave them blank and Tapeboard auto-detects call/put, strike, and expiry straight from an OCC-format symbol in your Symbol column.
• Live broker sync: connect a supported brokerage account and filled orders flow in automatically; manual, imported, and simulator entries coexist, and an entry-fingerprint de-dup prevents re-imports from double-counting.
• Export: CSV export of the visible set; bulk CSV/JSON export is a Terminal feature.

After an import lands, a summary screen shows what changed in that batch: trades added, open positions closed, duplicates skipped, and — once at least one trade in the batch is closed — Net P&L, Win rate, Profit factor, Best trade, Worst trade, and Fees paid, computed over just the rows you brought in so the numbers are easy to sanity-check against the file itself. Free accounts see a reminder that the full imported history (beyond the 20-trades-shown cap) and all 11 Reports open on Pro.

Reports

Eleven analytics reports, all off the same engine, all re-scoped by the period selector:

1. Trade Efficiency — capture % and "left on the table": how much of each move you kept vs gave back, split for winners and losers (MFE capture win/loss, max-P&L capture).
2. Hold Time vs P&L — a scatter of how long you held against what you made, colored by direction.
3. P&L by Symbol — which tickers pay and which bleed.
4. Performance by Setup — win rate and P&L per tagged setup.
5. P&L by Tag — performance sliced by your free-form tags.
6. P&L by Day of Week — your strong and weak days.
7. P&L by Hour — your strong and weak hours of the session.
8. P&L by Grade — does your self-graded A+ execution actually outperform your C trades?
9. Win/Loss Distribution — the shape of your wins and losses.
10. Mistake Cost Report — how much your tagged mistakes actually cost you, sorted most-costly first, in dollars and R.
11. Hold Time vs P&L (MFE/MAE) — maximum favorable vs maximum adverse excursion per trade (green tick = MFE, red tick = MAE), so you can see where you're getting shaken out early or holding losers too long.

Calendar

A monthly P&L heatmap: each trading day is colored green (net-positive) or red (net-negative) by its P&L, with the month's best and worst days summarized. Page between months with the prev/next controls (URL /journal/calendar/YYYY-MM). Click any day to jump to the Trade Log filtered to that date — which also opens the Daily Notes panel for the day. On Free, the heatmap renders over the rolling 10-trade sample.

Playbooks

Playbooks (Pro) turn a fuzzy "setup" into a rule-defined, machine-checkable strategy. A Playbook is the *plan*; a trade references one, and the Journal scores how faithfully the trade followed it.

Creating a Playbook captures:

• Name and description
• Entry rule — your entry trigger, in your own words
• Stop rule and target rule
• Time window — timeStart–timeEnd (24h HH:MM; blank = no constraint)
• Require-stop flag — does this setup demand a stop?
• Target R:R — the minimum reward:risk you're aiming for (minRr)

Assigning a trade — pick the Playbook from the dropdown in the trade form. The Journal then scores two things automatically:

• Adherence — did you follow the rules you actually wrote? It checks only the objective, machine-verifiable ones (no outcome, no subjective input): (1) did you enter inside the time window, and (2) did the trade carry a stop (when the Playbook requires one). Each check passes or fails; adherence is the percentage passed. If a Playbook defines neither rule, adherence is N/A.
• Per-playbook performance — win rate, expectancy, average R, trade count, and average adherence, rolled up per Playbook off the same unified engine. This is how you tell whether your edge comes from the *setup* or from *breaking your own rules*.

AI Analysis

The AI tab (Pro) runs three coach-style analyses over your closed trades:

• Pattern Recognition — a structured read of recurring patterns across your trades. Unlocks at 10 trades.
• Weekly Summary — an AI recap of the current week. Needs 3+ trades this week.
• Monthly Summary — an AI recap of the current month. Needs 5+ trades this month.

Each shows a live progress bar toward its unlock threshold while locked. Two more AI surfaces live outside this tab: the per-trade AI review in the expanded Trade Log row, and the Portfolio Health check on the Dashboard, which reads your traded symbols and returns a health read on the names you're carrying.

Share links

Any trade can become a privacy-safe public link at tapeboard.com/s/:id that unfurls with a rich OG preview card when pasted into chat or social — a deep-link back *into* Tapeboard, not a social-feed post. The card shows symbol, R, %, and the setup; by default P&L and position size are hidden — the server only includes those fields when you explicitly reveal them. Revealing P&L and revealing size are two separate Pro toggles; generating the link itself is free on any tier. Share the read without handing over your size.

The sim → journal bridge

The free paper-trading simulator is wired straight into the Journal. When you close a trade in the simulator, it is auto-logged into the Journal — no CSV, no import, no copy-paste. That closes the practice-to-review loop: rehearse a setup in the sim, and the moment you exit, the trade is sitting in your Trade Log waiting to be tagged, graded, and folded into your Tape Score. Because both surfaces run the same engine, a simulated trade is scored exactly like a live one — it's the fastest way to build a graded track record before you risk real money.

The daily journal

Beyond the trade rows, log a daily entry (the Daily Notes panel, opened when you filter the log to a date):

• Mood — a quick mood selection for the session
• Discipline — a 1-10 score of how well you followed your process
• Market context — how the tape was (VIX, sectors, breadth, catalysts)
• Mistakes — tag the mistakes you made from a chip list
• Lessons learned — free text

The daily entries are what the Mistake Cost report and the AI coach read against, so the more honestly you log them, the sharper the diagnosis.

Tiering

• Free — Trade Log (20 trades/month shown), Dashboard, and Calendar, all over a rolling 10-trade sample; Tape Score headline number + letter only; free share-link generation; CSV import (any of the 10 supported brokers, or any other CSV via the column-mapping wizard); no Reports, Playbooks, or AI Analysis.
• Pro ($39) — all six tabs, unlimited history, the full per-driver Tape Score breakdown, Playbooks, all 11 reports, AI Analysis and the journal AI coach, live broker sync, and the share-link P&L/size reveal toggles.
• Terminal ($79) — everything in Pro plus CSV/JSON bulk export of your full journal.

How to use it

1. Open /journal. Free accounts land on Trade Log; Pro and Terminal land on Dashboard, whose headline is your Tape Score — a 0-100 grade with an A-F letter once you have 30 or more closed real trades (10 in a pure-simulator view).
2. Practice in the simulator and close a trade — it auto-logs into your Trade Log instantly, no import, so you start building a graded record before risking real money.
3. In Trade Log, open a trade to tag its setup, add free-form tags, grade your execution (A+, A, B, C, F), write a note, and attach a screenshot; the Journal auto-renders the intraday chart with your entry and exit marked.
4. Add the stop and entry/exit times on each trade — they feed the R-multiple, hold-time analytics, and Playbook adherence checks.
5. Create a Playbook (Pro) with an entry rule, stop rule, target rule, time window, require-stop flag, and target R:R, then assign trades to it so the Journal scores your adherence and rolls up per-playbook win rate, expectancy, and average R.
6. Import your real fills (Pro): drop a broker CSV — common retail brokerage export formats auto-detect — or connect a supported brokerage for live sync. Fingerprint de-dup keeps re-imports from double-counting.
7. Open Reports (Pro) and read the Trade Efficiency, Mistake Cost, and MFE/MAE reports to find what your mistakes cost and how much you leave on the table; slice everything by setup, tag, symbol, hour, day-of-week, grade, and direction.
8. Open the Calendar, scan the monthly heatmap for your green and red days, and click a day to drill into that session's trades.
9. Log a daily journal entry — mood, a 1-10 discipline score, mistakes, lessons, and market context — to feed the Mistake Cost report and the AI coach.
10. Use the AI Analysis tab (Pro) for Pattern Recognition (≥10 trades) and your Weekly/Monthly summaries; run the Dashboard's Portfolio Health check on the symbols you carry.
11. Use the header period selector (Week / Month / Quarter / Year / All) to re-scope every tab, then [ EXPORT_PDF ] for a print-ready report.
12. Turn a standout trade into a share link (tapeboard.com/s/:id): generation is free and P&L plus position size stay hidden by default; flip the Pro reveal toggles only when you want to show them.

Limits

• Free: Trade Log (20 trades/month shown), Dashboard, Calendar, and CSV import, all over a rolling 10-trade sample; Tape Score headline number + letter only; no Reports, Playbooks, or AI Analysis.
• Pro ($39): all six tabs, unlimited history, full per-driver Tape Score breakdown, Playbooks, all 11 reports, AI Analysis and the journal AI coach, live broker sync, and the share-link reveal toggles.
• Terminal ($79): everything in Pro plus CSV/JSON bulk export of your full journal.
• Tape Score is gated to ≥30 closed real trades (≥10 in a pure-simulator view); the equity curve unlocks at 3 closed trading days; the day/hour breakdown charts unlock at 10 trades.
• Methodology: /methodology/tape-score for the five-component formula and weights; /methodology/r-multiple for R-multiple.

Troubleshooting

What is the Tape Score? It is a single 0-100 grade with an A-F letter that scores your trading process over five risk-normalized components — profit factor (25%), expectancy in R (25%), win rate (20%), consistency or percent green days (15%), and drawdown control (15%). The letter maps A ≥ 85, B ≥ 70, C ≥ 55, D ≥ 40, F below 40. Because it is risk-normalized it is account-size agnostic, so a small account and a large account are graded on the same curve. It needs at least 30 closed real trades to compute (10 in a pure-simulator view); Free sees the headline number and letter, and Pro unlocks the per-driver breakdown. The full formula is published at /methodology/tape-score.

How does the sim-to-journal bridge work? When you close a trade in the free paper-trading simulator, it is auto-logged straight into your Journal Trade Log — there is no CSV step and no import. That closes the practice-to-review loop, letting you build a graded track record from simulated trades before you risk real capital. Because the simulator and the Journal share the same stats engine, a simulated trade is tagged, graded, and scored exactly like a live one.

What are Playbooks? Playbooks are rule-defined setups, available on Pro, where you capture an entry rule, stop rule, target rule, time window, require-stop flag, and target R:R. Assign a trade to a Playbook and the Journal scores machine-checkable adherence and rolls up per-playbook performance including win rate, expectancy, average R, and average adherence. They turn a fuzzy setup into a measurable strategy.

What is adherence? Adherence is how faithfully a trade followed its assigned Playbook, scored from objective, machine-checkable rules only — no outcome and no subjective input. It checks whether you entered inside the Playbook's time window and whether the trade carried a stop (when the Playbook requires one), then reports the percentage of those checks that passed. If a Playbook defines neither rule, adherence is shown as not applicable.

Are share links private? Yes, by design. A share link at tapeboard.com/s/:id unfurls with a rich preview card showing the symbol, R, %, and setup, but P&L and position size are hidden by default, so you can show the read without exposing how much you made or how big you traded. Revealing P&L and revealing size are two separate Pro toggles you control per link; generating the link itself is free on any tier.

What is free versus Pro? Free includes the Trade Log (20 trades per month shown), the Dashboard, and the Calendar, all computed over a rolling 10-trade sample, plus the headline Tape Score number and letter, free share-link generation, and broker CSV import. Pro at $39 unlocks all six tabs, unlimited history, the per-driver Tape Score breakdown, Playbooks, all 11 reports, AI Analysis and the journal AI coach, and the share-link reveal toggles. Terminal at $79 adds CSV and JSON bulk export of your full journal.

Can I import from my broker? Yes, on every tier including Free. CSV import auto-detects any of 10 supported broker formats (Fidelity, Schwab, Webull, Robinhood, IBKR, Tradervue, DAS, Sterling, tastytrade, TradeStation) and pairs the fills into round-trip trades; an export in none of those formats opens a column-mapping wizard so any broker's CSV still imports, options included. Live broker sync (Pro) connects a supported brokerage for automatic sync of filled orders. An entry-fingerprint de-dup ensures re-importing the same export does not double-count trades, and Terminal adds CSV or JSON bulk export back out.

What shows up right after an import? A summary screen scoped to just that batch: how many trades were added, how many open positions it closed, how many duplicates it skipped, and — once something in the batch is closed — Net P&L, win rate, profit factor, best trade, worst trade, and fees paid, computed by the same engine Reports uses so the number can't disagree with the rest of the Journal.

Can I import options trades from a CSV? Yes. The column-mapping wizard has optional Option Type, Strike, and Expiry fields — leave them unmapped and Tapeboard auto-detects call/put, strike, and expiry from an OCC-format option symbol in your Symbol column, or map them explicitly if your broker's export splits them into their own columns.

Why is my Tape Score, equity curve, or breakdown chart not showing? Each unlocks at a sample-size floor so the numbers aren't noisy: the Tape Score needs 30 or more closed real trades (10 in a pure-simulator view), the equity curve needs at least 3 closed trading days, and the day-of-week and hour breakdown charts need 10 trades. Below a floor the Journal shows a progress affordance telling you how many more trades you need.

What do the 11 reports cover? Trade Efficiency (capture % and left-on-the-table), Hold Time vs P&L, P&L by Symbol, Performance by Setup, P&L by Tag, P&L by Day of Week, P&L by Hour, P&L by Grade, Win/Loss Distribution, the Mistake Cost Report (sorted most-costly first), and MFE/MAE excursion. They are a Pro feature and re-scope to the period you select in the header.

Related

• Simulator
• Trade Journal overview
• Tradervue alternative
• Tape Score methodology
• R-multiple methodology
• Scanner
• Charts
• Pricing