Desktop: Trade Journal

The Trade Journal is built into the desktop terminal and journals your trading automatically. Every fill you generate inside the terminal — paper or live — flows into the journal, where fills are paired into complete round-trip trades: flat, into a position, back to flat. You never type in an entry price, an exit price, or a P&L number. The mechanical facts are captured for you; your job is the judgment — tags, a rating, and notes.

The journal has its own top-level Journal menu in the menu bar:

You can also open it from the command palette: press Ctrl+P and run View: Toggle Journal Board. The journal is a normal dockable panel — drag it to any monitor, and it's restored with your workspace layout.

Every fill produced inside the terminal routes through one journal choke point, so nothing slips past it:

• Paper fills from the order ticket, bracket take-profit and stop legs, DOM ladder clicks, and quick orders — journaled under the PAPER account.
• Live broker fills — each execution (including partial fills) is journaled as it happens under the LIVE account.
• Manual entries (MANUAL) and CSV imports (IMPORT) — see below.

Fills are paired into round trips per account and symbol: going from flat to a position opens a trade, returning to flat closes it. Scale-ins and scale-outs become additional fills on the open trade, and a crossing fill (long 2, sell 5) closes the long and opens a short with the remainder. Each round trip carries:

The board is one panel, top to bottom:

• Summary tiles — NET P&L, TRADES, WIN %, AVG R, and PROFIT FACTOR, computed over whatever the filter currently selects. With the range on TODAY (the default) the tiles are your day summary.
• Filter bar — a BLOTTER / ANALYTICS view switcher, a symbol box, side (ALL / LONG / SHORT), a date range (TODAY / 7D / 30D / ALL), a clickable wall of tag chips (multi-select), and CLEAR. Selecting tag chips also shows a per-tag quick-stats line — win rate and net P&L per selected tag. Everything recomputes instantly as you change filters.
• The blotter — one row per round trip: time, symbol, side, quantity, entry → exit, hold, net P&L, R, your star rating, and the trade's tag chips. Open trades pin to the top with a live hold timer and tick-updated unrealized P&L. No trades in the filter means an honest empty state — never placeholder rows.
• The entry editor (right side) — select a trade and you get a read-only facts card (entry, exit, hold, P&L, R, MFE/MAE), the tag wall grouped by kind, a 1–3 star rating, a free-form trade note, and the DAY NOTE for that trade's session date.

Tags are chips, not dropdowns — click them on and off in the entry editor, and the same chips become filters in the filter bar. Every tag has a color from a fixed 12-swatch palette: Green, Red, Yellow, Slate, Sky, Violet, Magenta, Orange, Teal, Lime, Cyan, and Pink. There is deliberately no free color picker — tags store an index into the palette, so your chips stay readable and consistent forever.

Tags come in four kinds, and the journal ships with a starter taxonomy you can edit:

Tags also carry a discipline score (a mistake like Revenge Trade scores negative, Confident scores positive), so your tagging builds a quantified record of process quality, not just labels. MANAGE TAGS… in the filter bar opens the tag manager, where you add your own tags with a name, kind, palette color, and score.

Trades taken outside the terminal can still live in the journal. Two buttons in the filter bar:

Click ANALYTICS in the filter bar to flip the board from the blotter to the analytics dashboard. The same filter — symbol, side, range, tag chips — drives both views. Four boards:

• Per-tag equity curves — cumulative net P&L over your closed trades, one curve per selected tag (drawn in the tag's color) plus an ALL curve. Toggle tags on and off via the chip row above the chart to see which setups actually carry your equity.
• P&L calendar — a month grid of win/loss day cells with each day's net and trade count, weekly totals down the side, and month navigation.
• Edge tables — one row per tag and one per symbol: trades, win %, net, average R, profit factor, max win, max loss. Click any column header to sort. This is where "I think I trade pullbacks well" becomes a number.
• R distribution — a histogram of your closed trades in 1R-wide buckets, with headline tiles for expectancy, average win-R, average loss-R, max drawdown, and win/loss streaks.

The analytics are deliberately honest: every board is computed over closed trades only (an equity curve steps on realized P&L, never on a live open position), and trades without a stop are reported as a "no R" count rather than being folded into a fabricated bucket.

A practical end-of-day loop:

• Open Journal ▸ Today's Review — the range snaps to today and the day-note editor takes focus.
• The summary tiles are now your day: net, trade count, win rate, average R, profit factor.
• Walk the blotter top to bottom. For each trade: tag the setup, tag any mistake, pick the emotional state, rate it 1–3 stars, and leave a note while the context is fresh.
• Write the DAY NOTE — one note per session date, your narrative of the day.
• Once a week, switch the range to 7D or 30D, flip to ANALYTICS, and let the edge tables and per-tag curves tell you what to do more of — and what to stop doing.

Journal ▸ Playbook Tree opens a visual editor for your trading playbook: a node graph where group frames hold your setup categories, decision nodes branch into condition and outcome nodes, and the connections encode the if-this-then-that of how you actually trade. Nodes take their accent colors from the same 12-swatch journal palette.

Playbooks save as named versions in the same local journal database, and you can export and import them as JSON files. A seeded example tree loads on first open so you start from a working reference, not a blank canvas.

The journal persists to a local database file in your user profile's application-data folder, on your machine. Trades, tags, notes, ratings, and playbooks survive restarts and live entirely locally — the journal subsystem makes no network calls and nothing journal-related is uploaded to Sharpnel's servers.

• Desktop Terminal — what the desktop is, how to get it, and system requirements.
• Free vs Pro — exactly what Pro unlocks.