Journal settings — Bravo Lima Trading

Goals & rules

What is true of every trade and of the whole account.

Your rules and goals, one per line

Not a trading plan — a plan is per-setup and a trade is judged against it. These are the ones that are true of every trade and of the whole account, and they are read in your daily check-in, before the first decision of the day. A blank line separates groups, if you want goals apart from rules.

Show them in my daily check-in

Once a day, in your own day, inside the check-in pop-up that opens the journal. Deliberately not once per visit: a box you dismiss four times on a Tuesday is one you stop reading by Wednesday.

Rules the journal can measure — the half of these it can check on every trade for you. And your trading plans, which are per-setup rather than per-account.

Chart window

How much market is kept around a closed trade.

The window is sized from the trade's own duration, so a twenty-minute scalp and a two-week swing both come back readable — these decide how much, and which interval it ends up stored at. Changing them affects the next capture, not windows already stored.

Context before the entry trade durations

What the decision was made on. Five means a ninety-minute trade keeps seven and a half hours of what came first.

After the exit trade durations

Much less than before, on purpose. Zero is a real answer — a window running past the exit invites judging a good trade by what happened next, which is the most reliable way to learn the wrong lesson from it.

Bars to store at most

This is what picks the timeframe a trade gets stored at — the finest of 1m, 5m, 15m, 30m, 1H, 4H and 1D that fits the window under this number. A thousand is about four screens and 35 KB a trade.

Shortest trade to size from minutes

A floor, so a trade opened and closed inside a minute still gets a readable morning around it rather than seven bars.

Volume under the candles Nothing is fetched for it — every window this journal has stored carries its volume already. It costs about a fifth of the chart, which is the only reason it is a choice. Show trade number in trade list Every trade has a number of its own (#36). It is always on the trade's page and in Ask's answers; this adds it to each row of the list.

Timeline clocki

Minutes between two printed times.

Hide what had not happened yet Holding an entry in a trade's story redraws the chart as it was at that moment — everything after it comes off. Hindsight is what makes a trade look obvious in review; this puts the decision back in the state it was made in.

Fees

On trades you log by hand.

Synced and imported trades already carry the real fees from the exchange — nothing to set for those. This only decides whether closing a trade you typed in yourself asks for its fee.

Ask me when I close it A box for the real fee on the close screen, so net P&L is a record of what happened. Do not ask Net P&L is gross P&L for those trades. Simple, and blind to their costs.

Account size

What risk % is measured against.

Account size for synced trades

The real balance from the exchange What the account held when each trade opened, read from the exchange. Where an exchange does not report one, the fixed size below is used. A fixed account size The number below, for every synced trade, whatever the wallet held that day.

Base currency

What your account size and equity are stated in. Nothing is converted: each trade stays in the currency it was taken in, and the symbol shows only where the trades are in this one (USDT, USDC and the other dollar coins count as USD).

Fixed account size, in USD

Preferred chart data source

Ask coaching

The guidelines Ask follows when it reviews and coaches. Yours to change.

Plain words, sent to the AI with every question. Change what you want it to look at, how it helps during a trade, how it reviews one afterwards and how it writes. A section you leave as it is follows the journal's default, so improvements reach it. Not editable here, on purpose: the safety rules (no trade signals, forecasts or advice), what your data and the tools mean, and the rules that find supply and demand zones and market structure, so that the numbers mean the same thing every time.

Reviewing a trade default

What a review must contain, and which tools it uses without being asked (the journal's zones and structure are read by default).

INSIGHT, NOT RECITAL. The trader can already see their own trade page, notes, numbers and chart, so restating them is worthless: never open with, summarise or pad an answer with what the record says ('you wrote…', 'the stop filled at…', 'the plan was followed'), and quote their words only to set them against what actually happened. Every answer about a trade, a day or a pattern must contain findings the trader has NOT stated and could not read straight off the page, found by doing the work: (1) against the rest of the journal: run the comparisons (this trade's hour, weekday, symbol, direction, size as a share of equity, stop distance, hold time, time since the last trade or the last loss, how many trades that day, the plan, the check-in energy, against the same cuts of their other trades) and say where it is typical or an outlier, with the counts; (2) in the candles and volume: where the entry sat in the structure (distance from the nearest swing, a prior high or low, a sweep, a range edge, a session open such as London or New York), the volume and the wicks at the entry and at the turn (a spike, absorption, volume drying up), the stop against the nearest obvious liquidity, how far price went for and against the trade in R and when, and where the entry, stop and target sat against supply and demand zones (use find_zones for that, and zone_stats to see whether it shows up across their own trades) and against market structure (find_structure: with or against the trend, where in the range, the stop beyond the valid low or high; structure_stats across their trades). For ANY review of a trade that has candles, run find_zones and find_structure by default, without being asked and whatever words the trader uses: they are the journal's definition of structure and of supply and demand, so when they say structure, trend, swing, range, BOS, sweep, order block, imbalance, zone, supply or demand, mean these, not a pivot-based or other definition, unless they ask for another; (3) counterfactuals measured on the candles you fetched: what a different entry (a retest, a limit), stop (beyond the sweep, tighter), partial, break-even rule or exit would each have returned in R with fees, said plainly to be a hindsight replay of that one trade; (4) a concrete suggestion: what to change or try next, including what is not in their plans or rules, with a way to test it on their own history (run the query: how many past trades it would have touched and what happened). Say how many trades back it, and call a small sample a hypothesis, not a finding.

While a trade is open default

How Ask helps during an open trade: what it checks, what it lays out, what it never does.

While a trade is OPEN, be a calm execution assistant. Read the plan it follows (journal_plans, the trade's own thesis and notes, its stop and target), fetch the live candles, and say plainly: where price is against the entry, the stop and the target; what the candles and volume are doing (momentum, structure, a rejection, volume drying up or surging); whether the trade still looks like the plan; and what the trader's OWN plan says about moves like this one, quoted in its words. Then give the scenarios: what would confirm or invalidate the trade against the plan, and what each option open to them (hold to plan, move the stop under or over a named level, take a partial, exit) would mean in R with its trade-off, plus what you would watch next. Options with trade-offs, never an order ('exit now') and never a forecast. Offer a price_alert when a level matters (nearing the stop, the target, a plan level), as a way to be told, not as a call to act. Never push the trader to break their own plan in the middle of a trade.

After a trade default

How Ask reviews a closed trade against its candles, and how it judges process against plan.

How long answers are default

How much Ask writes by default, and when it may write more. Short by default: nobody reads an essay while a trade is running.

How answers are written default

Length, tone, layout and how selective it is. Written for a phone screen by default.

Be selective: the two or three findings that matter most, each with its evidence (numbers, counts, times) and what to do with it. No sections that mirror the record ('what went well' with nothing new in it), no praise that only restates. If you looked and found nothing non-obvious, say that in one sentence and name the data that would show it. Write for a phone screen, and make the answer easy to scan: short paragraphs of one to three sentences with a blank line between them, never a wall of text. The page renders Markdown, so use it: **bold** for the few things that matter most (a verdict, a key number, a price level, a trade's name), *italic* for a quoted word of the trader's or a caveat, and a hyphen list ('- ') when you give three or more parallel points, steps or levels; one idea per bullet, a bullet no longer than two lines. Open with the answer in one sentence, then the support. A small table is fine for a comparison; no headings (#) and no emoji, and do not bold whole sentences.

Voice

Words the transcriber should know, and the language you speak.

Your words

One per line. It starts with the instruments and exchanges you have actually traded, because those are the words you demonstrably say — change it to whatever you really use.

Language you speak in

Two letters — en, fr. Told to the transcriber rather than guessed at, which is the difference between a French recording coming back in French and coming back as English nonsense.

Time zones

Trades are stored in UTC and shown in yours.

Your time zone

UTC — there now.

A new day starts at

Times in Ask

Appearance

Theme and colours, on every device you sign in from.

Theme

Dark Light

Applies to the journal only, on every device you sign in from. The rest of the site keeps the theme set in the admin panel. Pick one to see it on this page straight away; it is kept when you save.

Colours

Profit in green / red Plan in green / red

Two pairs of colours, and each is used for one thing. Profit in green / red (the default) is the usual way round: green for what you made, red for what you lost, and blue and amber for the plan — followed it or broke it. Plan in green / red swaps them: green and pink for following or breaking your rules, with money in blue and orange so that a profitable trade is never mistaken for a good one. Candles on a trade's chart are always green and red.

Saves the sections above, down to Appearance. Emails, exchanges and keys save on their own.

Export everything

Your whole journal, in one zip.

One zip with your whole journal: database.sql (your trades, executions, attachments, plans and settings as native SQL), the same as spreadsheets, and every picture and voice recording as you uploaded it — filed by trade and by moment (thesis, during, after), with the link written out in a CSV and in SQL. Your exchange and AI keys are never included. It is built here in a few minutes and kept for 24 hours.

Include the pictures and recordings (can be large)

Emails & alerts

The weekly review, and a warning when an exchange stops syncing.

Sent to no address on your account. Price alerts have their own setting on Ask.

Weekly review Email me a review of my week The last seven days from your own journal: what you traded, whether you followed your plan, the rule you broke most, how your check-ins went — and one thing to work on next week.

On At your time (UTC)

Read the latest review now → — it is there whether or not you turn the email on.

Sync problems Email me when an exchange stops syncing When a key expires, is deleted or loses its permission, or the exchange stops answering — once per problem, not every minute.

Wait before emailing, so a short outage at the exchange does not bother you

Also tell me when it works again

Discord & Telegram

The same alerts you get by email, sent to your own Discord channel or Telegram chat.

In your own journal you connect a Discord channel or a Telegram chat here, and price alerts, sync problems and the weekly review arrive there too.

Exchanges

Whether each connected exchange is syncing. Keys are managed on the Exchanges page.

Binance Syncing Last synced Wed 14 Oct, 11:29 Re-check: nothing missing · last 7 days, 1 d ago. Manage → Bybit Syncing Last synced Wed 14 Oct, 11:29 Re-check: nothing missing · last 7 days, 1 d ago. Manage → Add another 18 exchanges are supported A read-only key lets the journal log your futures trades by itself. Open Exchanges →

This shows that the connection works, not that no trade was missed while it did not.

AI & voice keys

Optional. Your own keys; each is stored encrypted and never shown again.

Voice to text on the server

Turns a recording into text with Groq, so it works on a phone that cannot do it itself. Without it, your browser does it on the device. Make a key ↗

Ask your journal

Lets an AI write the read-only queries on Explore → Ask, using your own key. Pick the one you like; Gemini, Groq and OpenRouter have a free tier, no card needed; DeepSeek costs pennies. Without any key that tab stays off and everything else works. It reads everything attached to a trade: your notes and voice-note transcripts with any of them, screenshots with Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude, and how a voice note sounds (tired, rushed, calm) whenever a Gemini key is saved, whichever one is answering.

Google Gemini

Free tier, no card needed

In use for Ask

Groq

Free tier, no card — the same key as voice

Connected

OpenRouter

Free models, no card — a different free one is found each time

Connected

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

Paid, from a $5 credit

Not connected

Make a key ↗

DeepSeek

Pennies per question; needs a small top-up first (no free credit)

Not connected

Make a key ↗

Claude

Paid, from a $5 credit

Not connected

Make a key ↗