Handbook

How to use the journal

If you have not opened the journal yet, start at Setting it up.

Where your trades live

ANVL/ entries/ 2026-09-17/ entry.json one day, start to finish shots/ your screenshots settings.json setups, instruments, routine inbox/ days handed over from a phone

One folder, chosen by you on the first run. A day is a JSON file you can open in a text editor and a screenshot is a PNG sitting beside it. Back it up by copying the folder.

Open the journal from the address you were given. A copy somebody else has put up is not this journal, whatever it looks like.

Setting it up

Open the page, and it asks for one thing: a folder.

The first screen. Choose a folder, then click Allow when the browser asks.

Use Chrome or Edge. They can write straight to a folder on your disk. Safari and Firefox cannot. The page tells you so and offers to keep everything inside the browser instead. That works, but clearing your browsing data erases it.

If you are on browser storage

Export a backup from Settings regularly. It hands you a .zip of everything.

Settings

Settings is the pill at the bottom of the left rail:

Instruments you trade. Type the symbol and the point value fills itself in for any CME contract, because that number is set by the exchange and is the same for everybody. Fees are yours to type: they are your broker's, they differ per account, and the only place your real ones live is your own statement.
Setups you actually trade. It starts empty on purpose. You can also type a new one straight into a trade and it gets added.
Your numbers: standard size, standard stop, daily loss limit, daily target. These show on the Journal tab so you can see where the session stands against your own rules.
Your routine, written as a checklist. Daily, weekly and monthly are separate lists.

Starting from an example

An empty checklist is where most people stop, so the daily list ships with three written ones at three depths. Short is seven steps, the least that still counts as a journal. Involved is the full prep, session and review loop. Demanding is twenty eight steps with the chart prep broken out by timeframe, and it is meant to be more than you will keep.

Three depths on the daily list. Weekly and monthly get one each.

Load one and cut it down. None of them is meant to be adopted whole, and a routine you did not write is a routine you will not work. Loading over a list you have already written asks first, and tells you how many groups it is about to replace. Ticks you have already made stay on those days either way; steps that are no longer on the list simply stop showing.

Settings. None of it is required to start writing.

The trading day

The Journal tab runs in the order the day does. There is a clock strip pinned under the header on every tab, showing which part of the session you are in and what is next.

The clock. It shows the schedule's own timezone by default.

Work the routine

Your checklist, ticked off as you go. Ticks are keyed to the wording of each step, not its position, so rewording or reordering the list later will not move your history onto the wrong step.

The daily routine. One column per group you wrote in Settings.

Write the morning prep before the open

Day type, bias, levels, plan. Paste a chart with ⌘V and it lands here as long as no trade card is selected.

Morning prep, written before the open.

Log trades as they close

One card per trade. Fill in what you know and the rest derives itself: type an entry and an exit and it works out the points, then the dollars from your instrument's point value.

A trade. The two pills on the right are what it made against what it risked, and what it made in points.

Entry and exit each hold a whole scale. Type 29246.50, 29244.75 and it averages them. A price counts once, so you weight it by repeating it: two contracts filled at the same price is that price written twice.

The rules strip

The rules strip. It appears once you have set a rule or priced a trade.

Write the day up

Best trade, what improved, what the session taught you, the one thing to fix, how you actually felt, and what you are watching tomorrow.

Editing a past day

A day that has already happened opens read only, so a stray keystroke cannot change a session you finished last month. Press Edit to change it and Lock to put it back. The unlock applies to that one day and does not survive a reload.

A finished day, read only. Every field is still there and none can be typed into.

Importing from your broker

Import CSV sits next to + Trade in the header. Export a performance or fills report from Tradovate, Project X, NinjaTrader or anywhere else and drop it in. The layout is worked out from the column headings, and once you confirm a layout it is remembered, so the same broker does not ask twice.

The import screen. It names the layout it recognised, converts the times, and asks which account the file belongs to before anything is written.

Trades you already logged by hand

If you logged a trade by hand and then import the broker's copy of it, the importer matches them on symbol, direction, size, time and price and offers three choices per trade:

Choice	What happens
Fill	Keeps your card and your notes, and fills only the boxes you left empty from the broker's figures. This is the default.
Skip	Leaves your card alone entirely.
Add	Puts the broker's row on the day as a separate trade.

Set the timezone

A broker export is written in whatever clock the platform is set to, which may not be the one you trade on. The import screen has a timezone picker with a live sample of what a row's time becomes, so you can set it to New York and see the times land on the right hour before you commit.

Imported trades arrive marked missing data in red until you add the part the broker does not know: which setup it was, and why you took it.

Scale-ins and scale-outs

A position you added into and scaled out of comes back from the broker as several rows that were one trade. This is the most common reason an imported day does not match the day you remember trading.

Tick the cards that were one position. A bar appears along the bottom with the totals those trades come to as one: contracts, points and dollars. Merge only if that is the trade you remember taking.

Two trades ticked. The bar totals them and stays at the bottom of the window as you scroll.

The importer ticks the likely ones for you. When two trades have the same exit time down to the second, they came out on one order. Same for the entry time going in. Same instrument, same direction, same second: that was one position, not two trades.

What a merge does

Every entry fill goes into the entry box and every exit fill into the exit box, each price repeated once per contract, and the journal's existing average does the rest. A merged trade is exactly a trade you could have typed by hand.

12:14 1 ct in 29234.75 out 29219.25 -310 12:17 1 ct in 29227.75 out 29219.25 -170 becomes 12:14 2 cts ENTRY 29234.75, 29227.75 EXIT 29219.25, 29219.25 PTS -12 NET -$480

It refuses to merge a long with a short, two instruments, or two accounts. And like every delete, it is undoable.

Fees

Instruments in Settings has a column for each fee your statement lists. Commission and the exchange fee are charged per side, so a finished trade pays them twice. NFA and clearing are charged per round turn, once. Copy the numbers across as your statement prints them.

The Instruments card in Settings. The point value is filled in from the exchange; the two fee columns are yours to type.

Typing the rates does not change your numbers on its own. Review shows gross until you tell it otherwise. When you want the journal to read as what you actually kept, switch the toggle at the top of Review from Gross to After fees and every figure on the page comes down by the fees on those trades: the net, the calendar, the equity curve, the setup breakdown and the totals.

Nothing comes off an instrument you have not set a rate for. Review names that instrument underneath, so a total is never part gross and part net without saying so.

Review

Everything you have written, filtered however you want to look at it.

The Review filters: points or dollars, gross or after fees, a date range, a grouping, and a setup, instrument or account.

Review: the filters, the headline numbers, and the month underneath.

A month. Green days, red days, and each week totalled on the right. Faded days are from the month either side: they count in the week, not in the month.

Use the account filter if you run more than one account. A live account and a copier are two different sets of numbers, and a total that adds them together will not match either statement.

Reconciliation

Switch Review to dollars and a folded section appears under the charts. It stays shut until you open it, and it stays open after that. If your firm already reconciles for you, leave it shut and you will not see it again.

Shut, which is how it starts.

Open, it holds two panels. The first takes the balance you started the range with and the balance you have now, and subtracts. The second takes your broker's daily figures pasted one day a line, and lines them up against yours.

The two panels together. $136.14 unaccounted for, $43.86 of it commission, and the $180 left over sits on one day. The table below finds the same $180 on Sep 8.

The two answer different halves of the same question. A gap spread evenly across every day is fees. A gap sitting on one day is a trade in here twice, or one that never made it in, and the table names the day so you can open it and count.

Exporting

What	Where	For
Export PDF	Journal tab header	One day as a clean printed page, charts under each trade. Good for sending to a coach or a funded account review.
Export markdown	Bottom of the rail	The whole journal as text. Feed it to anything.
Export backup	Settings	A `.zip` of every entry and every screenshot.
Export one day	Settings	A small `.zip` of a single day and its charts, named by date. This is how a day gets from a phone back to your desk.
Restore from a backup	Settings	Reads a backup `.zip` back in. It adds days, it never overwrites one you have written.
Data folder	Bottom of the rail	Opens the folder your trades are sitting in.

Away from your desk

The journal is not built for a phone. It is there for the day you would otherwise skip it entirely, and getting that day home takes one file.

No phone browser can write to a folder. That is a limit of the browser, not a decision anyone made, and it is why a phone cannot share your desktop's folder the way a second computer can. On a phone the journal keeps its own copy in the browser's storage instead, and that copy is separate from the one on your desk.

Getting a day home

On the phone, open Settings and choose Export one day. You get a small .zip named by the date, holding that day and its charts.
Put the file in whatever cloud drive you already use, through the share sheet. Or email it to yourself. Anything that gets a file across.
On your desk, drop that file into the inbox folder next to your entries.
Next time you open the journal it notices the file and offers to bring it in. Once it has, the file moves to inbox/done. Nothing is deleted.

Bringing a day in adds it. If that date already exists and you have written something in it, what you wrote wins and the file is left alone. The one exception is a day that exists but is empty, which gets filled.

The same route works between two computers, and for the same reason you might prefer it to a shared cloud folder: nothing syncs behind your back and nothing can overwrite a day you are in the middle of writing.

Playbook

One page per setup, in your own words. It starts empty.

A setup. Panels can be tagged Long or Short and hold numbered steps, prose, or a chart.

Naming a setup here adds it to the dropdown on a trade. A setup you have traded but not written up is listed at the top of the tab.

The two worked examples

Two setups ship written up: an opening range breakout and a break and retest of the previous session's high or low. Both are offered in the rail until you load them, and loading one adds a page beside whatever you already have rather than replacing anything.

They are there to show what a finished page looks like. Both are old, generic and described in a hundred places; neither is anybody's method, and shipping them is not a recommendation to trade them. Each carries a panel headed what would make this fail, which is the panel most playbooks leave out and the one worth copying into your own.

A finished setup locks, so hovering over the words does not offer to change them. Press Edit when you want to.

Charts

A setup can hold charts as well as words. Drop an image onto the page or use the button, give it a caption, and tag it Long or Short. A marked up screenshot of the setup working says more than another paragraph. So does one of the trade you keep mistaking for it.

A setup with steps for a long and for a short, a panel for what it is not, and a marked up chart underneath.

Tools

Under Tools in the playbook rail.

Risk and sizing

Account, risk percent, instrument, stop.

Two thresholds live in Settings under Risk rules: warn above this much of the account per trade, and warn above this stop. They are rules rather than arithmetic, so they are yours to set, and they travel when you share your setup with somebody.

Schedule

The times your session runs on, and which clock you want to read them on.

This is what the strip at the top of every tab reads off: which block of the session you are in, how long is left of it, and what comes next.

Times are stored with their own timezone, so a New York schedule reads correctly from Arizona or from London. You choose whether to see it in the schedule's zone or your own, and whether the clock reads 6:00 PM or 18:00.

Sharing your setup

Settings → Share your setup with someone else exports a pack: one file holding the way you work, that somebody else loads in a click.

You choose what goes in it. Everything you have is ticked to start with, and you untick what stays yours. Handing over your playbook is not the same as handing over the way you run your morning.

Each part with a count beside it. Parts you have not written yet are greyed out.

What a pack does not contain

No trades. No P&L. No account names or balances. Not your daily numbers, not the size of your account, and not how you like your clock formatted. The test suite seeds a journal with marker strings and then searches the whole exported file for them, because a leak here would be the worst bug in the app.

Loading a pack replaces the routines, playbook and risk rules, and adds its setups, day types and instruments to your lists. Yours are not replaced, nothing you have journalled is touched, and it tells you what it is about to do before it does it.

Every feature

Feature	Where	What it does
Local folder storage	First run	Writes entries and screenshots as plain files in a folder you pick. No account, no server.
Browser storage fallback	First run	Works on Safari and Firefox. Says up front that clearing browsing data erases it.
Blocked network	Everywhere	A security policy your browser enforces stops the page opening any connection at all.
Daily routine	Journal	Your checklist, ticked per day. Ticks keyed to wording, not position.
Weekly and monthly routines	Journal	Separate lists on their own tabs, with their own ticks.
Morning prep	Journal	Day type, bias, levels, plan, notes and charts, written before the open.
Trade cards	Journal	Setup, direction, instrument, account, time, size, entry, exit, stop, points, dollars, notes and screenshots.
Scaled entries and exits	Trade card	A whole scale in one box, averaged, weighted by repeating a price.
Derived numbers	Trade card	Points from entry and exit, dollars from the point value. Never guessed without a direction.
R on every trade	Trade card	Entry to stop is the risk. R is what the trade made in units of that risk, green above water and red below. Nothing is shown if the stop is on the wrong side of the entry, because that is a typo, not a trade.
CME point values	Instruments	Type NQ and the journal already knows a point is $20. Thirty eight contracts built in, from the equity index through metals, energy, rates, FX and crypto. Fees stay yours to enter.
Missing data marker	Trade card	An imported trade says so in red until you add the setup and the note.
Screenshots	Everywhere	Paste with ⌘V or drop a file. Captioned, click to zoom.
Accounts block	Journal	What each account or copier actually did that day, with a multiplier.
Rules strip	Journal	Running total against your daily loss limit and target.
End of day review	Journal	Best trade, what improved, what you learned, one thing to fix, your state, tomorrow.
Locked past days	Journal	Finished days open read only. Edit and Lock toggle it.
Undo	Journal	Ten deep, covering trades, account rows and screenshots. Toast button, header pill or ⌘Z.
CSV import	Journal header	Round trips or raw fills, from any broker. Layout detected from the headings and remembered.
Duplicate matching	Import	Recognises trades you already wrote and offers fill, skip or add per trade.
Import timezone	Import	Converts the broker's clock to yours, with a live sample before you commit.
Position merging	Journal	Combines scale-ins and scale-outs into one trade, contract-weighted.
Group detection	Import	Ticks the rows that look like one position, with a preview and no automatic action.
Two-rate fees	Settings	Per side and per round turn, the way a statement quotes them.
After fees toggle	Review	Takes commission off every figure, and says which trades had no rate set.
Calendar	Review	Daily P&L with weekly and monthly totals. Click a day to open it.
Running total	Review	Cumulative equity curve, one line per account plus a total.
Breakdowns	Review	By setup, by day, by week, month or year. Points or dollars.
Filters	Review	Date range, setup, instrument, account, and free text across your notes.
Filters that stick	Review	Units, fees, range, grain and account come back the way you left them. Setup, instrument and the search box do not, because those are a question you asked once.
Broker reconciliation	Review	Paste your broker's daily figures and see which days disagree, and by how much.
Reconciliation fold	Review	Both statement panels sit behind one fold that starts shut. On a funded account the firm's own dashboard already does this, so it stays out of the way until you open it.
Playbook	Playbook	One page per setup, with tagged panels, numbered steps and charts.
Risk sizer	Playbook › Tools	Contracts the account allows at a given stop, from your own point values.
Live schedule	Playbook › Tools	Session times with a clock on every tab. Timezone aware, 12 or 24 hour.
Packs	Settings	Share routines, playbook, setups, instruments, risk rules and schedule. Never the record.
Pack checklist	Settings	Nine parts, each with a count, all ticked to start. Untick what you would rather keep.
Packs merge	Settings	Bringing a pack in adds to what you have. It does not replace your setups with somebody else's.
PDF export	Journal header	One day as a printed page, charts under each trade.
Markdown export	Rail	The whole journal as text.
Zip backup	Settings	Every entry and every screenshot in one file.
Fold the sidebar	Journal	Hides the list of past days and hands the width back to the page. Useful with charts up on a stream. Remembered, and [ does it too.
Themes	Settings	Dark, light or follow the system. Blue to start, violet if you want it.
Dates	Everywhere	Read as Aug 25, 2026. The files on disk stay 2026-08-25, because that is what sorts and what the importer matches on.

Keyboard

Key	Does
⌘V	Paste a screenshot onto the selected trade, or into morning prep if none is selected.
⌘↩	Add a trade.
⌘Z	Undo the last delete. Inside a text box it belongs to the text, as usual.
Enter	In a playbook step, starts the next one.
[	Folds the sidebar away and brings it back. Inside a text box the bracket belongs to the text.

On Windows and Linux, Ctrl instead of ⌘.

If something looks wrong

The numbers do not match my broker

Work through it in this order, because each step rules out a whole class of difference:

Filter Review to one account. A journal totalling two accounts will never match a statement for one.
Turn on After fees, and check every instrument you traded has its rates set. The page names the ones that do not.
Look for split positions. A scale-out imported as three rows reads as three trades. Merge them.
Paste the daily figures into the reconciliation panel and read which days disagree.

What is left after that is usually not trading at all: promotional credits, data fees, platform charges or margin violations all move your balance without being a trade, and a trade journal will never show them.

My P&L is bigger than my account grew

Those are two different numbers and both can be right. Trading P&L is what your trades did. The change in your balance is that, minus every charge that was not a trade, plus every credit that was not a trade.

I deleted the wrong thing

Press ⌘Z, or the Undo pill in the header. Ten deep, and screenshots come back with the trade.

The page is blank or a button does nothing

Reload it. The page is a single file with no cache of its own, so a reload always gives you the current version. If you have just been handed an updated file, reload before importing anything.