How playbooks work
A playbook is one setup you trade on purpose, written down: its entry rule, three profit targets measured in R, the tags you use to describe each trade, and the trades themselves. Once it holds enough trades, its reports show where the setup pays and Historical Intelligence learns from it.
Open your playbooks from Trading → Playbooks. Playbooks need Starter or above: see Plans.
What a playbook holds
Part | What it is | Where you set it |
|---|---|---|
Name and colour | How the playbook shows up on trades and on the chart | When you create it, or in Playbook settings |
Entry trigger | The rule that puts you in the trade, in your own words | Playbook settings |
R-levels | Three targets in multiples of your risk | When you create it, or on the Historical Intelligence tab |
Tags | The conditions you check on every trade | The Tags tab, or while you tag a trade |
Instruments | The markets you trade the setup on | Added when you file a trade, or with Add instrument |
Trades | Every trade you have filed into it | The Trade Book tab |
Playbook settings opens from the button beside the playbook's name.
R-levels
R is the amount you risked on a trade. Risk $200 and make $400, and the trade made 2R. Measuring in R lets a playbook compare trades of different sizes, on different instruments, fairly.
Every playbook has three R-levels:
Bare minimum: early profit, where you scale out part of the position. 1R unless you change it.
Main target: where the setup pays when it plays out. 2R by default.
Extended target: where a runner goes when momentum continues. 3R by default.
The reports measure each trade against these targets, and Historical Intelligence gives the odds of reaching each one. Saving new targets after a model is trained switches that model off until you retrain it.
Tags
Tags are the conditions you tick on each trade: Above VWAP, Retest held, News day. A tag is a Checkbox (true or not), a Radio Group (exactly one option, such as a range that was narrow, normal or wide) or a Checkbox Group (any of several options).
Tags belong to their playbook. Move a trade to a different playbook and its tags are cleared. Over enough trades, the Correlations report and the Relationships view on the Tags tab show which tags go with your winners. See Tags and criteria.
Filing trades into a playbook
A trade can come from Chartnaut Demo, a MetaTrader account or a backtest session. There are two ways to file it:
Chartnaut Demo
MetaTraderOn the chart, as you place it. In the Position Manager, Add to chart asks Log this trade?. Choose the playbook, tick its tags and click Draft. See Trading from the chart.
Afterwards. Open the trade in Trades and set its Playbook and Tags rows. See Trade detail.
Filing a trade on a new instrument adds that instrument to the playbook.
The Trade Book tab also lays out every quarter of history for each of the playbook's instruments. Opening a quarter starts a data collection session: a replay locked to that instrument and playbook, with trading costs, slippage and risk rules switched off, built for logging lots of examples of the setup quickly.
Reports
The Overview tab gives the headline numbers: cumulative R, win rate, trade count, average R and R over time. The Reports tab goes further:
Group | Reports |
|---|---|
Time | Daily, Monthly, Trade Timing |
Instruments | Instruments, Volatility |
Analysis | Correlations |
Performance | Edge, Risk & Reward |
Simulations | Monte Carlo |
You can add your own views to a playbook's reports, as you can to every trade, journal day and backtest session. See Build your own pages, Views on playbooks and Playbook reports.
Historical Intelligence
Historical Intelligence trains a model on one playbook's trades, one instrument at a time. It learns how your trades with a given set of tags tend to finish, and gives the odds of reaching each R-level on the next one.
You can train an instrument once it has 100 closed, tagged trades. The Historical Intelligence tab shows the count for each instrument as Trades to train. Data sources sets which trades count: Logged trades from the Trade Book always count, and Backtest and Live trades can be switched on or off.
The tag list you see when logging a trade on the chart has an Intelligence switch. With a trained model, turning it on shows the odds for your ticked tags beside them.
How many playbooks you can create depends on your plan:
Plan | Playbooks |
|---|---|
Free | None |
Starter | 3 |
Pro | 5 |
Ultra | Unlimited |
See Historical Intelligence limits.
To build your first playbook from start to finish, follow Turn your trades into a playbook.