Automated trading journal for Sierra Chart — track, analyze, and improve every trade
Trading Journal is a desktop application purpose-built for Sierra Chart traders who want to track, analyze, and improve every trade they take. Unlike web-based journals that require manual entry and store your data on third-party servers, Trading Journal imports directly from Sierra Chart, reads tick-level data from your SCID files, records optional per-trade screen clips, and runs on your machine with a local SQLite database. Trades, notes, screenshots, and videos stay local; internet is used for license activation, subscription refresh, and updates.
The main dashboard provides a complete statistical overview of your trading performance across any filtered date range, symbol, direction, account, strategy, checklist, or session-checklist combination. The layout is fully customizable: click "Edit Layout" to unlock drag & drop reordering of dashboard panes AND KPI cards, and use the centralized Show / Hide settings section to toggle individual KPIs, dashboard panes, toolbar filters, tabs, and trade detail sections. The layout is locked by default to prevent accidental changes. A sticky notes section lets you pin reminders and observations directly on the dashboard. The dashboard also includes Edge Performance and PropFirm account panes when those systems are configured.
Date filters persist across app restarts, so you always return to the view you left.
| Metric | Description |
|---|---|
| Total R / Total PnL | Cumulative risk-adjusted return or dollar P&L |
| Total Trades | Number of closed trades in the selected period |
| Trading Days | Number of days with at least one trade |
| Trades Win% | Percentage of trades closed with positive net PnL |
| Days Win% | Percentage of trading days with positive net PnL |
| Total Commissions | Sum of all commission costs |
| Profit Factor | Gross profit divided by gross loss |
| Expectancy | Average PnL per trade — expected gain per trade |
| Average PnL / Average R | Mean net PnL or R-value per trade |
| Avg Daily PnL | Mean net PnL per trading day |
| Max Drawdown | Largest peak-to-trough decline in equity |
| Max DD (R) | Maximum drawdown measured in R multiples |
| Max Consec Wins | Longest streak of consecutive winning trades |
| Max Consec Losses | Longest streak of consecutive losing trades |
| Sharpe Ratio | Risk-adjusted return relative to volatility |
| Sortino Ratio | Like Sharpe, but only penalizes downside volatility |
| Calmar Ratio | Annualized return divided by maximum drawdown |
| Max DD Duration | Longest period (days) spent below a prior equity peak |
| Recovery Factor | Net profit divided by maximum drawdown |
| Account Balance | Per-account initial balance + net PnL + deposits - withdrawals, with a tooltip breakdown |
Each KPI card can be hidden, and the whole KPI row can be reordered via drag & drop.
Every chart is interactive — hover for precise values (with time displayed on Cumulative R/PnL, Drawdown, and Running PnL tooltips), click to zoom, drag to pan. All info tooltips (i) show on hover with a dark background. Charts can be expanded to fullscreen.
All line charts use bicolor rendering: blue segments and points when the value is positive, red when negative. This applies to equity curves, running PnL, trade detail PnL, drawdown, and all rolling metrics. Bar charts follow the same convention — blue for positive, red for negative.
A GitHub-style contribution grid covering the full calendar year. Each cell represents one trading day, color-coded from deep red (worst days) through neutral gray to blue (best days). Hover over any cell to see the date, net R, and number of trades. Weekends can optionally be hidden. Instantly spot weekly patterns, cold streaks, and your most productive periods.
A traditional calendar view where each day displays its net R, number of trades, and a color indicator. The month header shows Net PnL, total R, win rate, and trade count, and the WK column summarizes each week. Every day (including those without trades) shows a pencil icon for session notes, so you can record pre-market plans and post-session reviews on any date. Click any day to navigate to the session detail panel.
A grid with hours of the day on one axis and weekdays on the other. Each cell shows the average R for trades entered during that specific hour on that specific day. Blue cells indicate positive average R, red cells indicate negative. Use this to identify your optimal trading windows and the time slots where you consistently underperform.
A table showing each of your custom checklist items alongside the average R of trades where that item was checked versus unchecked. Reveals which pre-trade habits and conditions actually correlate with profitability, and which ones are noise.
All trades display in a filterable, sortable table with columns for date, symbol, direction, account, entry price, exit price, R-value, MFE, MAE, duration, strategy, files, and checklist completion. Click any column header to sort. Use the filter bar (date range, symbol, direction, account multi-select, strategy, trade checklist, session checklist) to narrow the view. A Columns menu lets you show/hide every column individually, with preferences persisted per user and horizontal scrolling when overflow occurs. Open trades appear immediately as OPEN rows, so you can take notes and complete checklist items while the position is still live.
A Files column shows minimalist badges per trade: camera count for screenshots, note badge for written notes, and a video badge when a per-trade clip exists. Click the camera to open the screenshot lightbox with keyboard navigation (Esc / ← / →). Video clips open from Trade Detail and play in the shared lightbox with speed controls and Jump-to-entry.
Select multiple trades via checkboxes to bulk-assign Account, Strategy, or Notes, bulk-archive (move to "Old trades"), or bulk-delete. Deletes are permanent and protected from re-import by a tombstone mechanism — the NDJSON watcher will never resurrect a deleted trade.
Click any trade to open its detail panel:
Every section and individual metric in the trade detail can be hidden from Settings → Show / Hide Trade Detail Sections. The trade detail also supports previous/next navigation with side arrows and the keyboard ← / → keys, scoped to the current Trades table order.
Trading Journal reads Sierra Chart's binary SCID tick data files to reconstruct the exact tick-by-tick P&L of each trade. The engine uses FIFO lot tracking to correctly handle scale-ins and partial closes. The result is a precise chart showing exactly how the trade evolved from entry to exit — where it pulled back, where it extended, and how the final exit compares to the best and worst points during the trade.
This is not an approximation from bar data. It uses every recorded tick to produce the highest-resolution P&L curve possible. The detail chart supports $, R, and T (ticks) modes; the chart itself is labelled as gross PnL/R while trade KPI tiles continue to show net values where appropriate.
MFE/MAE values keep source provenance. Sierra Chart study values, SCID recompute values, and optional manual overrides are stored separately, and Trade Detail shows the active source when values diverge. You can review the divergence and promote the SCID value without silently losing the original tracker value.
Optional Post-Exit MFE tracking is forward-only: if it is enabled before a trade closes, the Sierra Chart study can continue watching after exit and report the post-exit peak, trigger reason, and optional screenshot. Older trades closed before the tracker was enabled cannot be backfilled. The tracker's EOD time uses the Sierra Chart machine's local clock, with no timezone conversion inside the study.
For any selected trade, the algorithm identifies the top 5 most similar trades in your history. Similarity is computed from four dimensions: symbol match, direction match, time-of-day proximity, and checklist item overlap. Each similar trade is displayed with its R outcome, letting you see how comparable setups have performed historically.
An Edge is a named saved filter combination, separate from simple Strategy tags. Define edges in Settings → Edge Items by choosing checklist items, session-checklist items, symbols, directions, accounts, and real/missed trade types. The Edge tab then shows each edge as a performance card, and each detail view breaks the same edge across all-time, last-N occurrences, and a custom date range.
Each edge can have its own description and cover image, so you can document the setup visually while keeping Strategy Items lightweight. The Dashboard's Edge Performance pane summarizes current edge performance without forcing you to rebuild filters manually.
Video Capture is optional and off by default. When enabled, the journal runs a bundled ffmpeg recorder with a rolling buffer, then assembles a clip after a trade closes. Default settings capture roughly 30 seconds before entry and 30 seconds after close, with configurable scope, encoder, quality, framerate, retention days, and max buffer size.
Supported modes:
The recorder can capture the display containing Sierra Chart, a fixed display, or all displays. Hardware encoders are auto-detected when available (NVIDIA NVENC, Intel QuickSync, AMD AMF), with CPU encoding as fallback. Microphone capture is optional for live voice notes; when audio is unavailable, the recording continues with a silent track.
Automatic clips attach to the trade record and show a video badge in the Trades table. In Trade Detail, clips play in the shared lightbox with 0.5×–2× playback speed and Jump-to-entry. The current implementation uses the journal's NDJSON trade flow plus the study's video_command.json for manual clips; it does not require a separate named-pipe connection.
The recorder compensates for small Sierra Chart versus Windows clock offsets when aligning clips and includes a diagnostics action in Settings to check ffmpeg, devices, capture scope, encoder fallback, buffer state, and recent capture errors.
A brand-new visual view of every trade that has at least one screenshot. Each trade is shown as a card in a responsive grid with the main screenshot on top and key metrics (symbol, direction, net PnL / R, date, contract count, notes preview) below.
Trades with multiple screenshots can have one chosen as the gallery thumbnail — and you can frame it precisely. Click the magnifier on any card to open the full lightbox. Click Use as gallery thumbnail to enter crop mode: a resizable / draggable rectangle appears over the image at the exact aspect ratio of your gallery card. Move it, resize it from any corner (aspect locked), and the Gallery card updates live as you drag. Everything auto-saves — no Save button to click. Click Set as gallery thumbnail to swap which image represents the trade without opening the crop editor.
Click anywhere on a card (outside the magnifier icon) to open the full trade detail overlay, exactly as clicking a row in the Trades tab.
Click any day on the calendar to open the session detail panel:
Click any trade in the session panel to dive into its detail.
Weekly and monthly note buttons let you record broader review comments from the WK column or the month header, independent of daily session notes.
A separate checklist from the trade-level checklist, designed for session-level habits: pre-market preparation, post-session review, emotional state, etc. Session Checklist items can be organized into named sets, reordered as sets, and filtered through Set → Category → Item navigation. The Diary page shows one global active set at a time, and each session stores notes/screenshots independently per set.
Trade and Session Checklist items can also be numeric gauges instead of simple checkboxes. Gauge items store a 1-to-N value, support lower-is-better scoring, and appear in Trade Detail, Session Detail, and Diary as scored process tags.
The Diary page is the daily-process view for Session Checklist work. It shows one global active Session Checklist set at a time, so you can focus on a specific routine such as pre-market, end-of-day review, or an instrument-specific checklist. Calendar session notes and screenshots remain isolated per set.
Screenshots attached to trades or sessions support three input methods:
Inside the trade detail, screenshots can be reordered via drag & drop — the new order is persisted, and the Gallery fallback thumbnail follows the first image when no explicit thumbnail is picked.
Log trades you identified but did not take. Each missed trade records the symbol, direction, entry time, the theoretical stop and target levels, and a reason for not taking it. The journal calculates what the R outcome would have been, giving you a running total of opportunity cost. Over time, this reveals whether your edge comes from the trades you take or the ones you skip.
Rules & Settings now live on a single split page: Rules & Risk Limits on the left, Settings on the right (50/50 on wide screens, stacked on narrow). Every sub-section is a collapsible dropdown with a count badge and an ⓘ tooltip explaining what it controls. One-click Expand all / Collapse all icons open or close every dropdown in a column.
| Rule Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Max trades per day | Hard limit on number of trades per session |
| Max R loss per day | Stop trading after cumulative daily loss exceeds threshold |
| Max $ loss per day | Dollar-based daily loss limit |
| Time window | Only allow trades within defined hours (e.g., 9:30–11:30 and 13:00–15:00) |
Violations are tracked automatically and displayed on the session detail panel. The dashboard shows violation frequency over time, so you can measure whether your discipline is improving.
Create, rename (pencil icon), delete, and reorder (drag handle) custom Account, Strategy, Trade Checklist, and Session Checklist items. Session Checklist items live inside named sets, and those sets can also be reordered. Compact item rows keep long lists readable without endless scrolling.
Edge Items are managed separately from Strategy Items. An Edge owns the description, cover image, and saved filter definition used for the Edge tab and Dashboard Edge Performance pane. Strategies remain simple tags.
PropFirm Configuration tracks account-level evaluation rules such as drawdown type, drawdown buffer, optional trailing-to-static lock target, profit target remaining, and manual payout ledger entries. It powers the PropFirm dashboard pane and does not change trade PnL, R-value, or win-rate calculations.
Account cash movements are tracked separately as deposits, withdrawals, and payouts. This lets account-level reporting reflect capital changes without rewriting historical trade records.
Each account can have its own initial balance and a date-only cash ledger. Deposits and withdrawals affect Account Balance but are independent of the toolbar trade date filter; payouts also feed the PropFirm dashboard statistics. The Account Balance KPI tooltip breaks the value down into Initial, Net PnL, Deposits, Withdrawals, and Current.
Every account row has a dedicated blue Commissions button that opens a searchable table where you set commission ($ per round turn) per symbol, for that account specifically. Toggle Use Sierra Chart commissions off in Settings → Commissions to apply your own commission rates instead of the ones SC exports. A Recompute commissions on all existing trades button re-applies the active rules to every imported trade and refreshes the session aggregates.
Trading settings include Break-Even Threshold in $, %, or ticks, optional net-R calculation including commissions, and a Recompute R-values action for applying the current risk settings to existing trades.
One section at the top of Settings groups all visibility toggles:
There is no Save Settings button. Every change — font size, commissions, risk mode, toggles, initial balance, always-on-top, gallery cards per row / card height, etc. — is persisted the moment you interact with it. Text inputs save 400 ms after you stop typing; checkboxes and dropdowns save instantly. A small green ✓ Saved indicator confirms each write.
When Default Risk mode is set to fixed ticks, an optional stop auto-fill derives a visible stop price from entry ± risk ticks for newly imported trades that have no stop. This preserves the same initial-risk math as the tick fallback and is mainly a visibility/replay aid.
Settings → Data can also watch Additional Journal Directories for multiple Sierra Chart instances, and Settings → Display includes View on Chart replay style, micro-on-full chart replay, MFE/MAE display format, table density, global font size, and Gallery card layout.
The Sierra Chart study can capture screenshots automatically or from an ACS button. Settings → Screenshot controls:
The missing-screenshot diagnostic checks the journal directory, auto folder, matching files, DB references, and per-trade screenshot files so support can identify attachment problems quickly.
A Global Font Size stepper in Settings → Display scales the entire renderer (topnav, settings, modals, charts, overlays) via Electron's webFrame.setZoomFactor. Default offset is +2 for a slightly larger comfortable baseline.
The Monte Carlo engine takes your actual trade results and reshuffles them 1,000 times to generate simulated equity curves. This answers the question: "Given the trades I've taken, how much of my outcome is skill versus luck?"
The simulation produces:
Trading Journal is designed to work seamlessly with the Trade Manager study. When you enter a position via Trade Manager, the stop loss level you drew on the chart is automatically captured and passed to the journal — so each imported trade arrives with its exact risk reference already filled in. The result: R-values, MFE, and MAE are computed automatically, with zero manual data entry. Just trade with Trade Manager, and your journal fills itself.
Trading Journal watches your configured journal folder and automatically imports new trades every 5 seconds. Open trades can appear as OPEN rows before the exit is received, then reconcile into the closed trade when the final fill arrives. Deleted trades are protected by a tombstone table — once you delete a trade (single or bulk), the import engine will never silently re-add it, even if the source NDJSON file still contains the row.
All import paths track the originating account. The toolbar has a multi-select account checklist — filter the Dashboard, Trades, Gallery, and Calendar by any combination of accounts simultaneously. New accounts discovered during an import are automatically added to the active filter selection so nothing disappears silently.
| Method | Description |
|---|---|
| Automatic (NDJSON) | The Sierra Chart study writes NDJSON files that the journal imports automatically every 5 seconds |
| Manual (SC TradesList) | Import a .txt file exported from Sierra Chart's Trade Activity Log |
| Re-import Last TradesList | Repeat the last manual import without reopening the file picker |
| Auto-import TradesList on change | Watch the last imported TradesList file and re-import it when Sierra Chart overwrites it |
Users running multiple Sierra Chart instances can configure Additional Journal Directories. Each folder is watched in parallel with the primary Journal Directory.
Manual TradesList import supports both Sierra Chart export modes:
Three Sierra Chart symbol naming conventions are recognized automatically:
| Convention | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Teton | ESH26_FUT_CME | Full contract with exchange suffix |
| Rithmic dot | ESM6.CME | Short contract with dot-separated exchange |
| Rithmic dash | ES-202506 | Symbol with year-month suffix |
Micro contracts (MES, MNQ, etc.) are auto-detected based on tick value, so the correct instrument definition is applied regardless of naming convention. Multi-account exports are parsed robustly — if a flat-to-flat group boundary marker is missing at an account transition, the parser flushes the previous account's trades under its own account before starting the next.
Auto-importing the last TradesList file is duplicate-safe and is the recommended workaround for order-allocation sibling accounts that are not streamed by their own chart-hosted TRADING_JOURNAL study.
Trading Journal reads Sierra Chart's binary SCID files directly to reconstruct intra-trade PnL curves at tick resolution. Point the journal to your Sierra Chart data folder and it automatically locates the correct SCID file for each trade's symbol. MFE/MAE values can come from the SC study's tick-by-tick tracker or from an explicit SCID recompute; the active source is tracked instead of being silently overwritten.
From any trade detail panel, click the replay button to open Sierra Chart at the exact date and time of the trade entry, with fill markers showing your entry and exit points. Review the price action around your trade without manually scrolling through charts.
When the chart is frozen by View on Chart, a persistent Back to Live pill appears in the journal's top bar so you can return Sierra Chart to live data even after switching tabs or restarting the app.
The current license system uses server-issued signed tokens stored locally in encrypted, hardware-bound storage. Activation is online. After activation, lifetime licenses validate locally and are designed for offline use; subscription licenses refresh periodically and include a grace period if refresh temporarily fails.
Lifetime users can use Release this device in Settings → License to free one activation slot before moving to another computer. Older plaintext license files are migrated silently to encrypted token storage on first launch of the hardened build.
A "SWITCH TO R" / "SWITCH TO $" toggle button switches the entire journal between two display modes:
The toggle applies everywhere simultaneously — dashboard KPIs, equity curve axis, trade table columns, session stats, Monte Carlo projections, and Gallery cards.
The journal ships with electron-updater, so new versions are downloaded and installed automatically in the background. After any update (or when you catch up across multiple versions at once), a What's New popup lists every Added / Changed / Fixed entry for every release between the last one you saw and the new one — stacked newest-first in a single view, never only the latest release's notes.
| Standard | Micro | Tick Size | Tick Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| ES | MES | 0.25 | $12.50 / $1.25 |
| NQ | MNQ | 0.25 | $5.00 / $0.50 |
| YM | MYM | 1.00 | $5.00 / $0.50 |
| RTY | M2K | 0.10 | $5.00 / $0.50 |
| Standard | Micro | Tick Size | Tick Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| CL | MCL | 0.01 | $10.00 / $1.00 |
| Standard | Micro | Tick Size | Tick Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| GC | MGC | 0.10 | $10.00 / $1.00 |
ZB, UB, TN, ZN, ZF, ZT
6E, M6E, 6J, 6B, M6B, 6A, M6A, 6C, 6S, 6N, 6M
ZS, ZW, ZC, ZM, ZL
LE, HE, GF
SB, KC, CC, CT, OJ
BTC, MBT, ETH, MET
Custom symbols can be added manually with user-defined tick size and tick value.
Export your filtered trade list as a CSV file. All columns from the trade table are included: date, symbol, direction, entry, exit, R-value, MFE, MAE, duration, account, strategy, and checklist items.
Generate a PDF report of the full dashboard including all 14 charts, the yearly heatmap, KPI summary, and checklist correlation table. Suitable for sharing with mentors, prop firms, or for your own records.