Journaling trades and positions

Day notes cover a trading day. The journal goes one level down: an entry on a single trade, and an entry on a position — the run from flat to flat that one or more trades make up. Both are text with tags, like notes, and the text can carry formatting (see Formatting).

Journaling trades and positions is part of Pro. On Basic the rows still show any entries you wrote while on Pro, and you can still edit them, but you cannot start new ones.

Where the journal is written

On the trade’s or the position’s own page. Every trade list leads there: the Trades section of a day page on the Calendar, and the Trades section of an account page, where each row is itself the link to its page. The page shows each entry it offers under its own heading, with the pencil at the heading’s left and the trash at its right; Add an entry, or the pencil, opens the Journal window on it, editing. The window closes when you save, cancel or delete, and the page shows the entry.

From a trade’s page (the FIFO view lists trades) the window has two tabs, This trade and The position the trade belongs to, each opening its entry for editing. From a position’s page (the Position view, the FIFO | Pos. switch in the sidebar, lists positions) there is one entry, the position’s.

A trade the sync could not place in a position offers the trade entry only.

When a trade is the only one in its position, the two are one event: the window offers the position’s entry alone, and a trade entry written on such a trade earlier keeps its tab. A day page, and a page of an account’s trades, hold only the trades that closed that day or on that page, so a position that spans two days can look like one trade on a day where only one of its trades closed, and gets the one entry there; its page lists every trade, and a trade’s own entry is written from that trade’s page, opened from its row there.

A row is itself the way to its page — see The trade page and the position page.

One entry per trade, one per position

A trade entry belongs to that trade alone. A position entry is shared: every trade in the position shows the same entry, and editing it from any of them changes it for all. A position made of a single trade takes the position’s entry: one trade, one event, one entry. Its row goes to the position’s page, and a trade entry written on it before stays where it is.

A row with an entry shows a small journal icon in its line, so you can see at a glance which trades and positions you have written about; the words are on the page. Once an entry carries tags, they show on the row as chips after the icon, so you can see how you filed them. A row whose entry carries pictures shows a small picture icon beside the tags; the pictures themselves open on the page.

Writing and editing

The window opens straight into the editor, written or not, as a form: a box for each of your sections (Setup, Why I took it, Management and What I would change, until you set your own under Settings → Journal). Write in the boxes that apply and leave the others empty: a section left empty is not saved with the entry. Add tags if you want them, and press Save, or Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on a Mac) from a box. Cancel discards what you typed. An entry can be saved with tags or a picture and no words. When nothing is left in it, neither words, a tag nor a picture, the button reads Delete entry and removes it; Ctrl+Enter only ever saves. Unsaved changes are never kept: if you close the window, switch its tab or leave the page with any, PropStax asks first. Stay keeps you writing; Continue leaves, and the changes are lost, a picture you added and did not save with them. An entry holds up to 2,000 characters in all, the titles of its sections included, with one counter under the boxes. The count is of the entry as it is stored, so an entry written as plain text before the form, close to the limit, can come out a little over it when one of its sections is edited; the editor says by how much, and saves once the entry is shortened. Tags come from the same library your accounts and notes use — see Tags & filtering.

To add a section to this entry alone, type its title in the field under the boxes and press Add. A section you added can be renamed with the pencil beside its title and removed with the trash icon; removing one that holds words asks first. (A section holding a table or a raw tag, written as plain text before the form, has neither control: it is kept as it is.) The sections every entry starts with are set under Settings → Journal, not here — see Journal settings.

When the entry is saved it reads as one text, each section under its title. A section left empty is not shown, unless Empty sections under Settings → Journal is at Show heading; the headings’ color and size are set there too (see Journal settings).

Formatting

Each box has five buttons on the line of its title (under the title, on a phone): Bold, Italic, Underline, Bulleted list and Numbered list. Select the words and press a button to format them; press it again to take the formatting off. Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I and Ctrl+U (Cmd on a Mac) do the same for bold, italics and underline. Everything else you type is shown as you typed it: a # or a * stays the character it is.

Text pasted from another app keeps its bold, italics, underline, lists and paragraphs; headings, quotes and code arrive as plain words, and a pasted link as its words. A table pasted from a sheet arrives as lines, one per row, with a space between the cells.

A web address stays plain text and is never clickable. An entry written before the form, as plain text, can hold a table or a raw tag, which the form shows as it will read and leaves as it is.

Exports carry an entry as it is stored: Markdown text. An entry written in the form has its formatting there as Markdown’s own marks (a section’s title on a line beginning ## , bold as **bold**), a backslash before a character Markdown would otherwise read as formatting (2\*ES), and, since Markdown has no mark for underline, PropStax’s own: <u>underline</u>.

At the bottom of the window, Open the full page of the trade or of the position opens the page of the tab you are on, or the position’s page whichever tab, when the trade is the only one of its position there. A window opened from a trade or position page carries no link to that same page.

On a trade or position page an existing entry shows as written under its heading, the pencil at the heading’s left and the trash at its right, as a day’s note has them; the pencil opens the window on the entry. Deleting asks you to confirm in place. There is no undo.

If the same entry is open in two places and both save, the second save stops and shows what is currently stored, with your text still in the box. Saving again replaces the stored version with yours.

When a trade changes

Brokers occasionally correct or remove an execution, and a resync then rebuilds the trades around it. Your entries follow the trades: when you open a trade or a position whose key changed, PropStax looks for the entry by the trades it was written against and moves it across. That needs some overlap between the trades you wrote it from and the ones on screen, so an entry written from one day of a position that spans two is best reopened from either day at least once. If a trade is removed altogether, or a correction leaves it unrecognizable, the entry stays on the Journal page, where you can read it or delete it with the trash icon on its row; it can’t be edited, since the trade it described is gone, and opening its page says so and offers its day. It also goes when the account is deleted with its journal.

The Journal page

Journal in the sidebar lists everything you have written on the book you are viewing, newest first, in three tabs: notes, position entries and trade entries. Each tab’s name carries how many the book holds, exact up to a hundred and 100+ past it. On the Positions and Trades tabs the entries sit under their day: the day’s heading carries the date, how many entries it holds and Open day, which opens the day the entries belong to, and pressing the heading folds or unfolds the day’s rows; every day starts unfolded. Each row names the account and the position or trade, and Open trade or Open position takes you to the entry’s own page. A trade entry can be edited right there with the pencil on its row; a position entry is edited on its page, since it belongs to every trade in the position. Two controls under the tabs narrow the list: All tags picks one or more of your tags, and Dates opens a small calendar for a day or a range of days; Clear filters removes both. See Notes on a day for the notes half and the filters in full.

Marks on the Calendar

On the Calendar grid, a day with entries shows a dot beside the day number, next to the dot a note leaves, each in a color of your choosing; hovering the day says how many entries it holds — see Notes on a day for the marks and the setting that governs them.

Pictures

A trade or position entry can carry pictures: one on a trade entry, two on a position entry. Open the entry’s window from its page (Add an entry, or the pencil on the entry), press Add a picture and choose a screenshot. It is shrunk to a longest edge of 1600 pixels and saved as WebP or JPEG before it uploads, so a phone screenshot costs a few hundred kilobytes, and it is attached when you save the entry. Adding pictures is a Pro feature; every plan keeps, shows and exports what it attached.

A thumbnail on the entry and a thumbnail on the Journal page open the viewer. Double-click fills the window and a second double-click returns to the dialog; the X or Escape closes it; the arrows move between a position’s two pictures. On a phone the viewer fills the window from the start.

A picture is removed while editing, never while reading: open the entry with the pencil, press the X on the picture’s thumbnail and press Save. Until you save, Put back or Cancel keeps it; once saved, the removal is permanent. Deleting the entry, the account or the broker connection removes its pictures too. Download everything under Settings, Privacy is a zip with the pictures beside your files, each named for its trade or position: its Trades file names each row’s pictures, and its Records file holds your entries. It also holds your journal as Markdown files, one per entry, each showing its pictures; Journal (.zip) downloads those files and their pictures alone (Exporting your data).

Deleting an account

Deleting an account, or a broker with its accounts, offers a choice: keep the journal entries written on its trades, with their pictures, or delete them with the account. Day notes are never touched by an account delete.