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Getting Started with TradeMonkey

TradeMonkey is an execution mirror for traders.

Instead of working like a traditional journal—where you reconstruct trades after the fact—TradeMonkey captures your intentions, emotional state, risk decisions, and rule boundaries as they occur. This removes hindsight bias and creates an accurate, objective record of your execution behavior.

TradeMonkey reflects these gaps back to you clinically, through three primary lenses:

The Three Lenses of the Execution Mirror​

1. Plan vs Execution​

Compares what you intended to do with what you actually did.

TradeMonkey captures:

  • Planned risk vs actual risk
  • Planned stop vs actual exit
  • Planned target vs realized R:R
  • Whether you followed your execution plan

Key question:
"Did I trade the plan I wrote down?"

2. State vs Outcome​

Connects your internal state with your results.

TradeMonkey records:

  • Entry emotions
  • Exit emotions
  • Conviction changes from entry to exit
  • Stress patterns around volatility or uncertainty

Key question:
"What mental states consistently help or hurt my performance?"

3. Rules vs Reality​

Tracks whether you follow the boundaries you set for yourself.

Examples:

  • Max daily loss
  • Max trades per day
  • Session-only trading
  • No trading around high-impact news
  • Position size limits

TradeMonkey checks every trade against your rules and exposes violations objectively.

Key question:
"Am I respecting the guardrails I said I would?"

Why TradeMonkey Must Be Used During Trading​

Traditional journaling happens after the session, when memory, emotions, and narratives change the truth.

TradeMonkey works differently.

It is designed to be used alongside your trading, not afterward. This ensures the data reflects what was actually happening in the moment, not a reconstruction of it.

Real-time usage allows TradeMonkey to:

  • Capture emotions without hindsight distortion
  • Track conviction before outcome influences perception
  • Measure plan adherence accurately
  • Detect rule violations as they happen
  • Produce clean psychological and execution patterns
  • Provide objective, actionable insights

If you wait until after the trade, the mirror becomes blurred.

TradeMonkey is an instrument panel, not a diary.
Instruments must be read during the flight, not after landing.

Your First 15 Minutes​

You do not need to configure everything immediately.
A few simple steps will produce your first insight.

1. Create a Trading Account​

Create one account for each real account you trade:

  • Challenge accounts
  • Funded accounts
  • Personal accounts
  • Futures / Forex / Crypto accounts

This keeps analytics, risk limits, and rules isolated per account.

2. Bring in Trades (The Foundation for All Insights)​

You can:

  • Import a CSV, which instantly populates your history, or
  • Manually log a few trades, if you prefer to start small
  • Simply copy and paste an image of your trade entry, take profit, & stoploss.

Even 10–20 trades are enough for the mirror to begin reflecting patterns.

TradeMonkey will automatically:

  • Detect orphans (missing manual entries)
  • Reconcile plan vs actual
  • Tag rule violations
  • Build early psychological baselines

3. Add Reflections When You Close Trades​

Reflections are captured at the moment of decision, not afterward.

For each closed trade, record:

  • Entry emotions
  • Exit emotions
  • Conviction score
  • Whether you followed your plan

These data points feed:

  • State vs Outcome analytics
  • Conviction drop patterns
  • AI Diagnostics
  • AI Deep Dive Explorer
  • Execution Recap summaries

Accurate reflections = accurate insights.

4. Keep TradeMonkey Open While You Trade​

This unlocks TradeMonkey's full value:

  • Real-time rule checking
  • Accurate risk comparisons
  • Clean emotional data
  • Live adherence tracking
  • Immediate violation detection
  • More truthful patterns

Think of TradeMonkey as a live mental dashboard sitting beside your charts.

5. Review Your Execution Recap (Your First A-Ha Moment)​

Once you have a few trades and reflections, open Execution Recap to see:

  • Entry vs exit screenshots (if uploaded)
  • Plan vs execution alignment
  • Changes in conviction
  • Emotional patterns
  • Rule violations
  • Notes or breakdowns per trade

This is where most traders notice the first clear pattern in their behavior.

Examples:

  • "My conviction collapses mid-trade during consolidations."
  • "I risk more when frustrated."
  • "My afternoon trades violate my session rule consistently."

Execution Recap makes discrepancies visual, objective, and impossible to ignore.

What to Do Next​

Once your first trades are logged:

  1. Add 1–2 basic rules (e.g., max daily loss, max trades per day).
  2. Explore Time-Scoped Analytics ("Last 20 trades" reveals recent progress).
  3. Review AI Diagnostics when they appear.
  4. Begin checking your trades against your rules daily.

This gradual approach builds the cleanest execution dataset possible.

If Something Seems Off​

Common steps:

  • Ensure you selected the correct account
  • Confirm your timezone and session rules
  • Check the CSV import guide if numbers don't line up
  • Ensure reflections are being added to closed trades

TradeMonkey will guide you as more data becomes available.

You can continue to the next page:
Create a Trading Account →