What your journal is telling you

The previous video covered logging trades. This one is about reading them back. A journal that only records what you did is a diary. The question worth answering is which parts of your process are carrying you and which are along for the ride.

Closed trades group four ways, and each one answers a different question. By source tab: which surface in this app produced the idea. By strategy: whether credit spreads or debit spreads or condors suit you. By the conviction grade at entry: whether the grade meant anything for your results. And by ticker: whether some names have been working for you and others have not. Take the third one seriously. If your C-grade entries do as well as your A-grade entries, the grade is not informing your results, and that is worth understanding before you lean on it.

The pattern digest reads across your closed trades for recurring behaviour, and it is scoped to whichever sub-tab you are on. The badge tells you which set it is describing. This matters more than it looks: paper experiments are where you try things you would not risk money on, so letting them into a read on your real trading would describe a trader who does not exist.

Real trades placed through the app journal themselves, stamped with the broker that filled them. For trades you placed elsewhere there is an import that reads your broker's history or your open positions directly. A row only ever matches against its own broker's book, and if that book could not be read on a pass, the row is not flagged as closed. An unreadable book is not evidence that something is gone.

Give this a quarter of real use before you make big changes on what it tells you. Small samples produce confident nonsense. Options Scanner is operated by Avenix Solutions LLC. It is not a broker-dealer and not an investment adviser, and it never holds customer funds. Options involve risk and are not suitable for every investor. Thanks for watching.