User Guide

The complete reference for the Tradelics desktop app — accounts and broker sync, trade details, metrics and analytics, filtering, reports, preferences, licensing, and every keyboard shortcut.

1. Getting Started

1.1 System Requirements

1.2 First Launch & Licensing

When Tradelics starts for the first time, the License & Activation screen appears. You have two options:

• Start Free Trial — begins a full-featured trial. No credit card required. The remaining trial days are shown in the title bar.
• Enter License Key — paste your purchased key to activate immediately.

See Section 15 — Licensing & Activation for full details on activation, device transfers, and what happens when a trial expires.

1.3 Creating Your First Journal

Tradelics stores all your trading data in a journal. A journal is a self-contained folder holding your trade database (.tdls) together with everything that belongs to it, such as your trade screenshots. Because it is self-contained, you can back up or move a whole journal simply by copying its folder — and you can create as many journals as you like (one per year, one per strategy, one per broker).

1. Go to File → New Journal (or press Ctrl+N).
2. Choose a location and a name (e.g., MyTrades-2025).
3. Click Save. The new journal opens and is ready to use.

On first launch, a welcome screen offers the same choices — create a new journal, open an existing one, or jump back into a recent one. Whether the welcome screen appears on startup, and whether Tradelics reopens your last journal automatically, are both configurable in Preferences → Appearance.

Recently used journals are listed under File → Open Recent. Use File → Save Journal As… (Ctrl+Shift+S) to create a backup copy at any time.

1.4 Setting Up Your First Account

Every trade belongs to an account, which represents a broker account and holds settings for currency, fees, and broker connectivity.

1. Open the Accounts view: View → Accounts or press Ctrl+A.
2. Click + Add Account.
3. Fill in the Account Name (e.g., “FTMO Challenge 100K”, “Kraken Spot”, “IC Markets Live”).
4. Select the Account Type — Real Trading for broker-connected accounts or Test Trading for paper trading / manual journals. See §3.2 for the difference.
5. Enter your Initial Balance — the balance before your first trade.
6. Select the account’s Currency (USD, EUR, GBP, etc.).
7. Click OK.

1.5 Adding Your First Trades

There are three ways to get trades into Tradelics:

For the fastest setup: try CSV import first, since your broker platform almost certainly has a trade history export. Live sync can be configured later once you’ve verified the data looks correct.

2. Main Interface Overview

Opening a journal lands you on the Dashboard (part of the Metrics view, §11.1). It is built to answer both opening questions at once — how the account is doing, and what you most recently traded — so you can start from there and move to the Trades view when you want the full list. Every other view is one click or one shortcut away on the toolbar below.

3. Managing Accounts

Open the Accounts manager at any time with Ctrl+A or View → Accounts. You can create as many accounts as you need; to view just one of them, add an account condition in the Filter view.

3.1 Creating an Account

Click + Add Account in the Accounts view. The Account Dialog has two sections side by side: Account Details on the left — which includes the fee settings — and Broker Connection (Optional) on the right. The left half answers what is this account; the right half answers where its trades come from.

The dialog sizes itself to whatever the account actually needs: choosing a broker adds its connection summary and sync schedule on the right, and the window grows just enough to fit them. On a narrow screen the two sections stack into a single column instead, so nothing is ever cut off.

Accounts you no longer trade can be archived rather than deleted: archive from the Account Dialog, and use the Show archived toggle in the Accounts view to bring them back into sight. Archiving keeps the trade history intact while decluttering your day-to-day view.

3.2 Account Types: Real vs. Test

If you’re unsure which to choose, use Real Trading for any account synced from a broker, and Test Trading for manual journals.

3.3 Account Fields Explained

Field	Description
Account Name	A descriptive name shown throughout the app. Examples: “FTMO Challenge 100K EUR”, “Kraken Spot”, “IC Markets Live USD”.
Account Type	Real Trading or Test Trading (see §3.2).
Initial Balance	Your starting balance before any trades were placed. Used to calculate your equity curve, drawdown, and running balance. For funded accounts, this is the challenge starting capital.
Currency	The account’s native currency (USD, EUR, GBP, etc.). When your journal contains only this currency, all P&L is displayed in it; when accounts in different currencies are analyzed together, aggregated figures are shown in the base currency set in Preferences → Regional → Default Currency (see §3.5). The balance column always stays in native currency and is never converted.
Color	A visual identifier for this account in charts and multi-account views. Pick a unique color per account.
Server time zone	The time zone this account’s broker runs its trade server on — see below.

Server time zone

Brokers stamp trades in their own server’s time, which is almost never yours. Tradelics converts each trade from that zone to your computer’s time zone, using the zone’s rules on the day of the trade — so a trade from January and one from July are each shifted by the right amount, across daylight-saving changes on either side.

The conversion happens once, as the trade is synced or imported, and the converted time is what gets stored. Changing this setting afterwards therefore affects only trades imported from then on — it does not go back and re-time the trades already in your journal. If times are already wrong, correct the zone and then re-import (or re-sync) the affected period.

It sits in Account Details, next to the currency, and it is set per account — not per broker connection. An account maps to one broker, and the zone describes that broker whether or not you ever configure live sync: an account you only ever feed with CSV files needs it just as much as a synced one. Two prop firms can sit in different zones, and a single application-wide value could not be right for both.

Value	Effect
Use default	Follows Preferences → Sync/Import → Server time zone. This is the starting value, and for most people it is the right one — nearly every forex server runs on EET/EEST, which is what the default is set to.
A specific zone	Overrides the default for this account only. Use it when one of your brokers is on a different clock from the rest.

The figure in brackets — Use default (EET (+1 h now)) — is how far ahead that zone is of your computer at this moment. It is a reading, not the setting, and it changes twice a year on its own.

If imported or synced trades land at the wrong time of day, this is the setting to check first — before importing a large history. It applies to MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 alike, and to CSV imports, because the zone belongs to the broker’s server rather than to the platform or file reading it.

3.4 Fee Configuration

The fee settings inside the Account Details section let Tradelics calculate a commission for you instead of you typing one on every trade. Three fields work together:

Field	Description
Apply Fees	When the calculated fee is applied: Never, Import/Sync Only, Manual Only, or Always. With Manual Only, fees are added to trades you enter by hand while synced trades keep whatever the broker reported; Import/Sync Only and Always make Tradelics compute and apply fees to imported and synced trades too.
Fee Rate %	The rate used in the calculation.
Fee Type	What the rate applies to: % of Trade Value, Per Contract, or Per Order.

All P&L metrics in Tradelics are net of fees (commission + swap deducted). This is intentional — trading performance should always be measured after costs.

3.5 Multiple Accounts & Multi-Currency

You can have any number of accounts in a single journal, and by default every view aggregates trades and metrics across all of them.

When those accounts use different currencies (say, a USD futures account and a EUR forex account), Tradelics converts P&L figures to a single base currency so the numbers can be compared and summed. The base currency is set in Preferences → Regional → Default Currency. Conversion kicks in only when the trades being analyzed actually span more than one account currency, and it applies everywhere statistics are computed — Metrics, the Calendar, and every breakdown page — not just one view.

Exchange rates come from ECB / IMF data, are cached locally, and are resolved at each trade’s close date (looking back up to seven days to cover weekends and holidays). If a rate can’t be found for a trade, that trade is flagged and a warning banner tells you the converted metrics are incomplete. The raw account balance always remains in the account’s native currency.

4. Broker Synchronization

Live sync lets Tradelics pull your trade history directly from your broker — no CSV exports required. New trades appear automatically, and closed positions are updated in real time.

4.1 How Sync Works

4.2 MetaTrader 5 (MT5)

MT5 sync uses the Tradelics Bridge, which is installed alongside Tradelics and starts automatically when Tradelics opens — there is nothing to set up for the bridge itself.

In most cases Tradelics does not need your MT5 password. If your MetaTrader 5 is already signed in to the account you want to journal — which is how a prop-firm terminal normally arrives — Tradelics simply reads that open session. Nothing to type, nothing stored.

Setting up a connection

1. Open Accounts (Ctrl+A), select your account, and click Edit (or create a new account).
2. In the Broker Connection section, select MetaTrader 5 as the broker type. The MetaTrader 5 setup opens automatically.
3. Choose your installation. Tradelics lists the MetaTrader 5 installations it found on your computer, by folder name — for example FTMO Global Markets MT5 Terminal. Pick the one this account trades through, or click Browse… and select its terminal64.exe if it isn’t listed.
4. Confirm the account. Press Continue: Tradelics opens that installation and reads which account it is signed in to, then shows you the login, server and broker. If it is the right one, click Link this account — setup is done.
5. Click OK, then Sync (Ctrl+S) or the sync button in the toolbar. The first sync fetches everything the broker still holds for that account.

Afterwards the Broker Connection section shows a short summary — the linked account, the installation it uses, and how it connects. To change any of it, click Edit broker settings beside the broker dropdown and the setup reopens on your current installation.

That button is the way back into the wizard at any time. It reads Set up MetaTrader 5 until a terminal is linked and Edit broker settings afterwards, so its label tells you which state the connection is in. If you cancelled the wizard when it opened by itself, this is how you reopen it.

Subsequent syncs only fetch what is new or has changed since the last one, which is what keeps them fast.

How far back the first sync reaches

Back to the account’s first trade, in practice — not to whatever period your History tab happens to be showing. That selector is a display filter on the terminal window; it does not limit what Tradelics can ask for. On a test account with History set to Last month, the first sync still returned 1,737 deals going back more than two years.

This is worth knowing because it is not how every journal works: several import only what the local terminal is currently holding, so a fresh terminal install, or one whose history has been trimmed, quietly gives them a shorter record. Tradelics asks the broker rather than the window.

The limit is whatever your broker still keeps. Prop firms and brokers do retire old account data, and a terminal that has never been signed in to the account has nothing cached to fall back on — if you need trades older than your broker retains, import them from a statement instead (§7).

Why the installation matters

Prop firms each ship their own branded MetaTrader 5, so several installations can be open at once. Without being told which one to use, the bridge attaches to whichever terminal it happens to reach — with two open, that is a coin flip. Choosing the installation is what makes a sync land on the right account, which is why it is the first thing the setup asks and why it cannot be skipped.

Look for terminal64.exe when browsing. MetaTrader 4 uses the name terminal.exe, and the two cannot be told apart by name alone — Tradelics only offers terminal64.exe automatically, and warns you if a browsed terminal.exe looks like an MT4 installation.

When Tradelics does need a password

Reading the open session only works for the account the terminal is already signed in to. Use the password route when that isn’t what you want — for example the installation is signed in to a different account, or you want Tradelics to sign in by itself. On the confirmation step, choose Continue with credentials and enter the Server, Login and Password for the account you want. The server is pre-filled from what the terminal reported, which is usually already correct.

A connection with credentials will sign the terminal out of whatever account is open in order to reach its own, and Tradelics cannot sign that one back in afterwards — it does not hold its password. If both accounts matter to you, give each one its own MetaTrader 5 installation instead.

If your broker issues an investor password, use that one rather than your master password. It signs in read-only, which is all a sync needs, and it cannot place or close a trade even if it is exposed. Most prop firms hand you one alongside the master password without being asked.

Passwords are only stored when you choose this route, and they are encrypted at rest using your operating system’s secure storage. A connection that reads the open session has nothing to encrypt.

Per-connection sync settings

Under Sync schedule, an MT5 connection carries one setting of its own beyond the auto-sync toggle and interval:

Setting	What it does
Start MetaTrader 5 when syncing	MT5 has to be running for a sync to succeed. Tick this and Tradelics launches this account’s installation itself when it is closed. Leave it off to start MetaTrader 5 yourself — the sync then tells you it is not running instead of launching it.

It is per connection, because each one has its own terminal. There is no application-wide auto-start setting.

The Server time zone is not here — it lives in the Account Details section on the left, because it describes the broker whose trades the account holds whether or not a connection is ever set up. See §3.3.

Two accounts, one MT5 installation

If two of your accounts sign in through the same installation, syncing one of them means signing the other out first.

A connection that reads the open session never switches — with no password it could not sign back in, so instead of offering a switch it cannot complete, the sync stops and tells you to open that account in the terminal.

A connection that holds credentials can switch, and what happens is governed by the MT5 account-switch policy in Preferences → Sync/Import: Ask me first, Switch without asking, or Never switch. Automatic background sync silently skips an account that would require a switch unless the policy is Switch without asking — it has nobody to ask, and ending a live session unattended is not a decision to make on a timer.

The reliable answer to this situation is one MetaTrader 5 installation per account. Prop firms hand you a branded terminal precisely so each account has its own; separate installations mean no switching, no passwords, and no interrupted sessions.

4.3 MetaTrader 4 (MT4)

MT4 has no live API, so Tradelics puts a small file inside MT4 that writes your trade history out to a CSV, and reads that file — including automatically, on a schedule. The setup wizard installs both files for you and tells you what to do inside MT4 afterwards.

1. In Tradelics: Accounts → Edit → Broker Connection, choose broker type MetaTrader 4, then click Set up MetaTrader 4 — the button beside the broker dropdown.
2. Choose the terminal. The wizard lists the MetaTrader 4 installations it finds on this computer. If yours is not listed — a portable install, or one in an unusual place — use Browse and point it at terminal.exe inside the MT4 folder.
3. Install. Tradelics copies Tradelics_Export.mq4 into that terminal’s MQL4\Scripts and Tradelics_AutoExport.mq4 into MQL4\Experts.
4. Do the three things inside MT4 that the wizard lists — it will not export until you have. They are: right-click the Navigator and choose Refresh (or restart MT4); drag Tradelics_AutoExport onto any chart; make sure AutoTrading is on.
5. Pick the account. The last page lists the account numbers found in the exports on this computer. If the export has not run yet there will be nothing to list — finish the steps above, or type the number in by hand.
6. Sync with Ctrl+S. Tradelics reads the exported CSV and imports the trades.

Once it is set up, the Broker Connection section states what it will do, naming the terminal it reads — “Reads account 1420743762 from FTMO Global Markets MT4 Terminal.” If it says Not set up yet, the wizard has not been completed and no sync will find anything.

As with MetaTrader 5, the button beside the broker dropdown changes with the state: it reads Set up MetaTrader 4 until the terminal is linked, then Edit broker settings. Click it whenever you need to re-run the wizard — after a Tradelics update, or to point the account at a different terminal.

There is nothing to configure inside MetaTrader 4. The Expert Advisor follows the sync interval you set for this account in Tradelics: change the interval and the export re-times itself within one interval, with no reattaching and no restart. To export immediately at any time, double-click Tradelics_Export under Scripts in the Navigator.

The export deliberately has no settings dialog. Some MetaTrader 4 builds crash while drawing that dialog for an attached Expert Advisor — the terminal closes outright — so the export gives MT4 nothing to draw. If attaching it used to crash your terminal, it will not any more.

What MT4 gives you

Closed trades, open positions, pending orders and deposits or withdrawals, with prices, times, commission, swap and profit — plus two figures MT4 does not record itself:

• Account equity on open positions: balance plus all floating profit and loss, read at the moment the export ran.
• MAE, MFE and ETD — how far a trade went against you and in your favour before it closed. MT4 keeps no record of what happened between entry and exit, so the export reconstructs it from the terminal’s one-minute bars.

Reconstruction has two consequences worth knowing. It is accurate to the minute, not the tick — a spike still registers, because it is inside the minute’s high and low, but not exactly when within that minute it happened. And it needs the one-minute history to be present: MT4 downloads that on demand, so a symbol you have never charted may have none, and trades older than the downloaded history have none either. Where it is missing, MAE and MFE are left blank rather than filled with zero — a zero would read as “this trade never went against me”, which is a claim about the trade rather than an admission that the data is absent.

After a Tradelics update, run the wizard again if sync reports that the export layout is not supported. The files live inside MT4 and are not updated when Tradelics is, so a new version can be reading for columns your copy of the script does not write. Note that a running EA keeps using the copy it was compiled from: after re-installing, remove Tradelics_AutoExport from the chart and drag it on again, or it will go on producing the old format.

If the files cannot be written — MT4 is open, or installed somewhere protected — use Save files… in the wizard and copy them in yourself: Tradelics_Export.mq4 into MQL4\Scripts, Tradelics_AutoExport.mq4 into MQL4\Experts, under File → Open Data Folder in MT4.

Per-connection sync settings

Under Sync schedule, an MT4 connection carries one setting of its own beyond the auto-sync toggle and interval:

Setting	What it does
Start MetaTrader 4 when syncing	When this account syncs and its MetaTrader 4 is closed, Tradelics starts it and waits for the export to be rewritten before reading. Leave it off to open MetaTrader 4 yourself.

A closed terminal means no sync, not a silent one. MetaTrader 4 syncs by reading a file its export writes, so a closed terminal has nothing new to give — reading it again would just re-import what you already have. Tradelics refuses the sync and says so, rather than reporting success on data that has not moved. This also covers a terminal that is running but not exporting: sitting at a login prompt, or with no Expert Advisor attached to a chart.

If your MT4 timestamps look shifted, set the Server time zone in the account’s Account Details section (see §3.3). The zone belongs to the broker’s trade server rather than to the platform reading it, so the same setting covers MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5 and CSV imports alike.

4.4 cTrader

cTrader connects straight to cTrader’s own servers. There is nothing to install, no bridge to run, and the cTrader platform does not need to be open — Tradelics can sync while your computer is the only thing switched on.

You never enter a password or an API key. You sign in on cTrader’s own page, approve Tradelics once, and that is the whole setup.

1. In Tradelics: Accounts → Edit → Broker Connection → cTrader.
2. Click Authorize with cTrader. Your browser opens on cTrader’s sign-in page.
3. Sign in and approve the request. Tradelics asks for read-only access to your account information — it cannot place, modify or close trades, and never asks to.
4. Return to Tradelics. It lists the trading accounts that sign-in gave it access to, each showing the broker, login, currency and whether it is live or demo. Pick the one to journal.
5. Confirm, and choose whether to reconstruct MAE/MFE excursions (see below). Click Finish.

Sign in with the cTrader ID that holds the account. cTrader only shows Tradelics the accounts belonging to the cTrader ID you signed in with. Some brokers — prop firms especially — create a separate cTrader ID for your funded account. If the account you were expecting is not in the list, that is almost always why: sign out of cTrader in your browser, then authorize again with the other ID. An account under a different cTrader ID needs its own connection in Tradelics.

MAE/MFE excursions

cTrader does not report how far a trade moved in your favour or against you before it closed, so Tradelics reconstructs it from minute-by-minute price history. That takes extra requests, which is why it is a choice rather than automatic. You can switch it off, or back on, any time through Edit broker settings.

The reconstruction runs on every sync, including the first, and it catches up on itself: each sync also revisits a batch of closed trades that still have no excursion figures, so trades missed while the option was switched off — or while a long sync was cancelled — fill in over the syncs that follow rather than staying blank forever. Once an account is up to date this costs nothing, because only trades still missing the figures are ever looked at.

Where minute history does not cover a trade, MAE and MFE are left blank rather than zero — zero would claim the price never moved against you, which is a specific and flattering thing to say about a trade nobody measured.

When sync stops working

A cTrader connection can go stale on its own, which no other broker in Tradelics does. The account dialog shows the current state next to the connection, and both cases are fixed the same way — click Edit broker settings and authorize again. Your account, trades and settings are kept; only the sign-in is renewed.

What you see	What happened
Signed in — connected until date	Normal. Tradelics renews this by itself well before it runs out.
Sign-in has expired	The connection went unused long enough to lapse. Authorize again.
Access was revoked	Tradelics’ access was withdrawn from your cTrader account settings, on cTrader’s side. Authorize again to restore it.

You can withdraw Tradelics’ access at any time from your cTrader account settings, under the section listing connected applications. Sync stops immediately; nothing already in your journal is affected.

Prefer not to connect at all? cTrader users remain fully supported through CSV: export your trade history from the cTrader platform and import it via File → Import → Transactions. The cTrader CSV format is auto-detected (see §7.2).

4.5 Kraken

Kraken uses a direct REST API connection — no bridge required.

1. Log in to your Kraken account and go to Settings → API → Create New Key.
2. Grant the key these permissions: Query Funds and Query Closed Orders & Trades (optionally also Query Open Orders & Transactions). No withdrawal or trading permissions are needed or recommended.
3. In Tradelics: Accounts → Edit → Broker Connection → Kraken.
4. Enter your Kraken API Key and Private Key (Secret), then click OK.
5. Sync with Ctrl+S.

Never grant Withdrawal or Trading permissions to Tradelics API keys. Read-only permissions are sufficient and much safer.

4.6 NinjaTrader 8

NinjaTrader 8 is the simplest broker to connect: Tradelics reads NinjaTrader’s local trade database directly. No plugins, no add-ons, no exports.

1. In Tradelics: Accounts → Edit → Broker Connection → NinjaTrader 8.
2. Tradelics auto-detects the NinjaTrader database at its standard location (Documents\NinjaTrader 8\db\NinjaTrader.sqlite). If yours lives elsewhere, tick Use custom location and browse to it.
3. Pick which NinjaTrader account to sync from the account dropdown, then click OK.
4. Sync with Ctrl+S.

4.7 Auto-Sync

Tradelics can sync automatically in the background at a configurable interval. Auto-sync is configured per broker connection, in the account’s Broker Connection section — not in Preferences — so each account can have its own rhythm.

• Auto-sync toggle: turns background syncing on or off for this connection.
• Interval: 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, or 30 minutes, or 1 hour. The default is 30 minutes.
• Last Sync Time: a date-time picker showing where the last sync left off. Set it back to an earlier point to re-fetch history from that moment.

MetaTrader connections add one more setting here — Start MetaTrader 5 when syncing (see §4.2) or Start MetaTrader 4 when syncing (see §4.3). Both platforms need to be running for a sync to produce current data, and both settings let Tradelics open the terminal itself rather than refusing. The account’s Server time zone is not part of the sync schedule; it is an Account Details field, covered in §3.3.

Auto-sync doesn’t interrupt your work or change the current view. If you’d like a heads-up when it finds something, enable Auto-sync Notifications in Preferences → Sync/Import — a small toast then reports how many trades were added or updated; leave it off and auto-sync runs completely silently.

The same notification also tells you when auto-sync stops working — a broker rejecting the connection, a terminal that is closed, a network that is down. Because auto-sync runs on a timer, the warning appears when syncing goes from working to failing rather than on every attempt, and clears itself once a sync succeeds again. A repeat every minute would only teach you to dismiss it unread.

If you would rather auto-sync never spoke up, leaving Auto-sync Notifications off silences the failure warning too. Worth knowing before you turn it off: a failing auto-sync looks exactly like a quiet trading day.

Use a short interval (5–15 minutes) for active trading sessions. For end-of-day journaling, the default 30 minutes — or 1 hour — is plenty. Every sync is a real request to your broker, so reserve 1 minute for an account you are actively trading rather than leaving it on a journal you review at the end of the day.

5. Trade Details

Trade Details (Ctrl+3) shows one trade at a time in full detail. This is where you annotate trades, add screenshots, write notes, assign labels, complete trade reviews, and read Trade Mentor insights.

The three panels — Trade Form, Image Gallery, and Strategy & Labels — can be arranged in any order via Preferences → Appearance → Trade Details Layout.

5.1 Navigation

Navigate between trades using:

• Prev / Next arrows in the toolbar
• Ctrl+← (previous) and Ctrl+→ (next)

Trades load in pages. When you reach the last trade in the current batch, the next batch loads automatically. The sort order and active filter from the Trades view apply here too, so navigating means walking through the same sequence of trades you see in the table.

5.2 Trade Fields Explained

Field	Description
Symbol / Pair	The traded instrument (e.g., EURUSD, AAPL, BTCUSDT, ES). Drives price precision formatting via the Symbols manager tick size.
Direction	Long (buy) or Short (sell).
Entry Time	Date and time the trade was opened.
Exit Time	Date and time the trade was closed. Empty for open / pending trades.
Entry Price	The fill price at which the position was opened.
Exit Price	The fill price at which the position was closed.
Volume / Quantity	Position size in lots, shares, contracts, or units depending on the instrument type.
Net P&L (Profit)	Net profit or loss after all fees have been deducted (commission + swap).
Commission	Broker commission charged for this trade.
Swap	Overnight holding cost (positive means you paid, negative means you received a credit).
Status / Trade Type	Open, Closed, Pending, Deposit, Withdrawal, etc. Determines whether the trade is counted in performance metrics.
Initial Risk	The dollar amount you had at risk when the trade was entered. Required for R-multiple calculations. Enter it manually, or let Tradelics derive it from your order price, stop loss, and position size.
Stop Loss	Your planned stop loss price at entry. Used to calculate Initial Risk if not entered directly.
Take Profit	Your planned take profit target at entry. Used for R:R ratio calculations.
Comment / Notes	A full notes field for the trade — pre-trade rationale, post-trade reflection, or any observation. Beyond free-form text, it includes a notes editor with loadable, editable templates, so a recurring review structure doesn’t have to be retyped on every trade.

Fields populated from broker sync (profit, commission, swap, entry/exit times and prices) are automatically filled and kept in sync. Fields like Initial Risk, Stop Loss, Take Profit, and Labels are yours to fill in manually as part of your journaling practice.

5.3 Image Gallery

Attach trade screenshots directly to a trade — entry charts, exit setups, annotated price action, anything you want to reference later.

• Add images: Drag and drop image files onto the thumbnail strip (or a thumbnail), or click the upload button to browse.
• Multiple images per trade are supported, shown as a carousel you can step through.
• Images are stored inside your journal folder (in its images subfolder), so backing up or moving the journal folder takes all your screenshots with it.
• Images appear inline in reports (PDF and Word export) at the size configured in Preferences → Report.

Annotate your charts in TradingView, Sierra Chart, or any charting app before screenshotting, then attach the annotated image. The image gallery in the Report view makes this a powerful review tool.

5.4 Labels, Strategies & Tags

Labels let you categorize trades and then analyze performance by category in the Metrics view. There are four label types:

Label Type	Purpose	Examples
Strategy	Your high-level trading methodology or approach. One per trade.	“Trend Following”, “Breakout”, “Mean Reversion”, “News Trading”
Signal	The specific pattern or trigger that caused the entry. One per trade.	“Pin Bar at Support”, “Double Top Breakout”, “MA Crossover”, “RSI Divergence”
Confirmation	An additional factor that validated the signal before entry. One per trade.	“Higher TF Alignment”, “Volume Spike”, “Key Level Confluence”
Tags	Flexible multi-purpose labels. Multiple per trade.	“Revenge Trade”, “Emotional”, “Perfect Setup”, “Missed Target”, “Over-leveraged”

Labels are created and managed in the Labels Manager (§8). Once created, they appear as dropdowns in Trade Details.

The most powerful use of labels is in the Metrics view — you can see win rate, profit factor, and average P&L broken down by strategy, signal, or tag. This reveals which setups actually work in your trading.

5.5 Trade Review

The Trade Review is a questionnaire you fill out after each trade to track your psychology, discipline, and execution quality. Responses are stored with the trade and drive the Psychology Analytics in the Metrics view.

Click the Trade Review button in Trade Details to open the questionnaire dialog.

Trade Review questions are fully customizable — add, edit, remove, and reorder questions to match how you actually review your own trades. The default set documented below is what ships out of the box and is enabled from the start; treat it as a well-built starting point rather than a fixed list.

Default Questions (15, grouped by category)

Your answers do more than sit in the archive: they feed the Psychology analytics, and every question also becomes a filterable field — so you can, for example, pull up all trades where you answered “No” to “Did you follow your trading plan?” (see §12). Custom questions you add become filterable in exactly the same way.

5.6 Trade Mentor

The Trade Mentor is a rule-based advisory system that generates contextual, personalized insights for each trade. It analyzes your trade against your own historical performance baseline to surface actionable observations about risk, execution, fees, and patterns.

The Mentor works for trades in all phases:

Insights appear as a scrollable card carousel at the bottom of Trade Details. Click any dot to jump to a specific insight, or click the graduate-cap icon (its tooltip reads Open Trade Mentor) to see all insights stacked in a full detail window.

The Mentor is personal to your data — it uses your own trade history to establish the baseline, so insights become more accurate and relevant as your journal grows.

6. Trades

The Trades view (Ctrl+2) displays all trades in a spreadsheet-like grid. It’s the fastest way to scan your trade history, sort by any column, or select multiple trades for bulk operations.

• Sorting: Click any column header to sort by that column. Click again to reverse the order. The toolbar’s Reset Sort button returns to the default order, and its First / Previous / Next / Last buttons step through the table.
• Column visibility: The table carries far more columns than fit on screen — account, order ID, balance and equity, symbol, status, direction, net and gross P/L, commission, swap, prices, quantities and more. Right-click any column header and use the Column Visibility submenu to show or hide individual columns and build the layout you actually work in.
• Multi-select: Click rows with Ctrl (individual) or Shift (range) held down, just like in a spreadsheet. Press Delete or Backspace to remove the selected rows in bulk.
• Quick navigation to Trade Details: Double-click any row to open that trade in Trade Details.

Row context menu

Right-click a row (or a selection of rows) for the most powerful bulk tools:

• Batch Edit — change a field across all selected trades at once.
• Delete Rows — remove the selection.
• Merge with Planned — link an executed trade to the planned trade it fulfilled. Available when exactly two rows are selected, one of them planned, with matching symbol and direction.
• View Orders — open a dialog listing the individual executions behind the trade.
• Open in Trade Details — jump to the trade in Trade Details.

The Trades view respects the active Filter (§12). Apply a filter first (e.g., “only EURUSD trades in March”) and the table, Metrics, and all other views will reflect that subset.

7. Import & Export

7.1 CSV Import

Go to File → Import → Transactions (Ctrl+I), or drag a CSV file onto the Import button in the toolbar. Tradelics automatically detects the broker format from the file’s column headers and structure.

1. Select your CSV file from the file dialog (or drop it on the Import toolbar button).
2. Tradelics shows a preview of the detected format and how many trades will be imported.
3. Select the target account that the trades belong to.
4. Review the preview, then click Import.
5. Tradelics imports the trades and recalculates balances automatically.

Importing the same file twice won’t silently corrupt your data. Tradelics detects duplicates and shows them to you — split into same-account and cross-account matches — so you decide whether to overwrite the existing trades or import the duplicates as new.

Transactions aren’t the only thing you can move: Accounts, Symbols, and Labels each have their own entry under File → Import (and matching entries under File → Export…), which is handy for carrying your label taxonomy or symbol settings into a new journal.

7.2 Supported Broker Formats

The following broker CSV formats are auto-detected:

Broker / Platform	Export type
MetaTrader 5 (MT5)	Full history report (CSV or HTML)
MetaTrader 4 (MT4)	HTML Account Statement, or the CSV produced by the bundled Tradelics_Export.mq4 script (see §4.3) — other MT4 CSVs are not auto-detected
cTrader	Trade history CSV export
Binance Futures	Futures trade history CSV
FTMO	FTMO account statement CSV
NinjaTrader 8	Trade performance CSV export
TradingView	Replay-mode paper trading CSV and strategy tester CSV (both formats detected)
Tradelics	Re-import from a Tradelics CSV export (for moving data between journals)

If your broker is not in this list, use Custom CSV Mapping (§7.3) to create a mapping for any CSV format.

7.3 Custom CSV Mapping

Custom mappings let you teach Tradelics how to read any CSV format — even from brokers not listed above.

The mapping editor opens from inside the Import Wizard — start an import (File → Import → Transactions) and choose to create or edit a mapping when your file isn’t auto-detected. The editor lets you:

• Map columns: Tell Tradelics which CSV column corresponds to Symbol, Direction, Entry Time, Exit Price, Profit, Commission, etc.
• Set number / date formats: Specify whether your CSV uses US decimals (1,234.56) or European decimals (1.234,56), and the date format used.
• Handle split-row format: Some brokers export entry and exit as separate rows linked by a trade ID. Enable “Split-Row Mode” and specify the ID column.
• Default values: Set a default Direction or Status for rows that don’t include that column.
• Gross vs. Net profit: Specify whether the profit column includes fees already deducted, or whether fees are in a separate column.

Mappings are saved by name and reused on future imports. You can create multiple mappings for different brokers.

7.4 Exporting Data

Export your trade data in three formats:

Format	How to export	Contents
CSV	File → Export… → Transactions	All trade fields as a spreadsheet. Exports the entire journal, regardless of any active filter. Open in Excel, Google Sheets, or re-import into another Tradelics journal.
PDF	Report View → Export → PDF	Formatted trade report with trade details, comments, images, and Trade Review answers. Professional layout for sharing or printing.
Word (.docx)	Report View → Export → Word	Same content as PDF but in editable Microsoft Word format.

Moving a journal with CSV

A Tradelics CSV export is recognised on the way back in, and it brings its own accounts with it. The import skips the account-selection and column-mapping steps entirely — there is nothing to map, because the file already names the account each trade belongs to, so a journal holding three accounts comes back as three accounts rather than being flattened into one.

Accounts in the file that do not exist in the destination journal are created for you and listed on the confirmation screen before anything is written. They take their currency from the trades themselves, and they open at a zero balance — worth setting afterwards in the Accounts manager, since drawdown and R-multiples are measured against the account’s starting balance.

Exporting to CSV and re-importing is a convenient way to merge two journals or move a subset of accounts between them. To move a journal whole, copy its folder instead — a journal is self-contained (see §1.3), and copying keeps your screenshots and account balances exactly as they are.

8. Labels Manager

Open the Labels Manager with Ctrl+L or View → Labels. This is where you create and manage all labels used for trade categorization.

A sidebar on the left switches between five sections. The Overview is the summary page: a count card for each of the four label types, and a Most Used Labels grid showing your labels ranked by how many trades carry them. It’s the quickest way to see whether a category has grown unwieldy, or which labels you created and then never actually used.

The remaining four sections are one per label type. Within each, you can reorder labels by dragging and archive the ones you’ve retired — archived labels disappear from Trade Details dropdowns but keep their history (use Show archived to bring them back into view).

There are four label types:

Start with a small, focused set of labels rather than creating dozens upfront. Three or four strategies and five to ten signals gives you meaningful analytics without diluting each category with too few trades.

9. Symbols / Pairs Manager

Open the Symbols Manager with Ctrl+Y or View → Symbols. It lists every trading instrument that appears in your journal.

The table shows eight columns per symbol — Type, Symbol, Base, Quote, Tick Size, Tick Value, Exchange, and Source — and the toolbar above it offers a type filter, a search box, Import / Export buttons, a Show archived toggle, and Add Symbol for manual entries.

Tick Size

Tick size controls how many decimal places Tradelics uses when displaying prices for that instrument. When a new symbol appears via import or sync, Tradelics resolves the tick size automatically: it first checks its built-in symbol library (stripping common broker prefixes like PF_ or FX_ if needed), then falls back to pattern-matching the symbol name, and finally to a generic default of 0.01. If actual trade prices show more precision than the current setting, the tick size is refined to match — it only ever becomes more precise, never less. You can override it manually at any time.

The Source column records how each symbol was resolved (library, parsed, or manual) — a quick way to spot an auto-detection that guessed wrong.

Tick Value

Separate from tick size, the Tick Value is the monetary worth of one tick. For futures-style instruments it feeds the P&L calculation, so check it if a futures trade’s calculated profit looks off.

Instrument type	Typical tick size
Forex majors (EURUSD, etc.)	0.00001 (5 decimal places)
Forex JPY pairs (USDJPY, etc.)	0.001 (3 decimal places)
Stocks & indices (US)	0.01 (2 decimal places)
Crypto (BTCUSDT)	0.01 or 1.0 (varies by exchange)
Futures (ES, NQ)	0.25 (quarter-point)

If a symbol is not auto-detected (e.g., a custom CFD), click Add Symbol to create it manually with the correct tick size.

10. Calendar View

Press Ctrl+1 or click Calendar in the toolbar to switch to the Calendar View.

The calendar shows your trading performance day by day on a monthly grid:

• Green days — net profitable day. Red days — net losing day. Days with no activity stay neutral.
• Each day cell shows the day’s wins and losses counts, plus the net P&L and total trade count.
• A weekly summary column on the right totals each week; a month summary shows the month’s P&L, wins, and losses.

Click any day to drill down: a details dialog opens listing that day’s individual trades (your active filter stays untouched). The weekly and monthly summaries are clickable in the same way for week- and month-level details.

Use the month/year navigation — or the Today button — to move around. The calendar respects the active filter, so filter to a specific account or symbol to see only that subset. Trades are placed on the day they were closed; open trades without a close time don’t appear on the calendar. Whether weeks start on Sunday or Monday is set in Preferences → Regional.

The Calendar View is one of the fastest ways to spot patterns: do you consistently lose on Mondays? Do you over-trade after a losing week? These patterns become immediately visible.

11. Metrics & Statistics

Press Ctrl+4 or click Metrics in the toolbar. The sidebar on the left lists 18 analysis pages — the Dashboard, then three labelled groups; the main area displays the selected analysis.

Metrics always reflect the active filter. To analyze a specific subset — e.g., only EURUSD trades in Q1, or only trades using the “Breakout” strategy — apply your filter first (§12), then open Metrics. All performance metrics are computed over closed trades only; open and pending positions are excluded until they close.

11.1 Dashboard & Edge Score

The Dashboard is where Tradelics opens, and it carries both halves of the picture: the headline numbers, and the trades behind them. Seeing a figure and seeing what produced it no longer means switching views. It is also yours to arrange — add, remove, resize and reposition the widgets through Edit Dashboard to build the page you actually want to see. First-time users start from a sensible default layout.

The default layout runs top to bottom as:

• Sixteen KPI cards, with the Win/Loss distribution pie, the Edge Score ring and the win/loss streak timeline beside them. The cards are deliberately not every metric that exists: figures the pie and the timeline already state are left out, so no number on the opening screen is printed twice. Everything omitted is still available from Edit Dashboard.
• Open Positions — what is live right now, with its unrealized P/L.
• Recent Trades — what most recently closed. Use the selector in its header to choose how many to show.
• P/L by week and P/L by month, then the drawdown curve beside P/L by day of week, then P/L by strategy beside P/L by symbol.
• Outcome Distribution — a histogram of your trade results — beside Risk-Adjusted Ratios.

Both trade tables size themselves to their content, so an account with nothing open costs a single line rather than an empty card. Click the icon at the end of any row to jump straight to that trade in Trade Details, and drag or resize their columns — the arrangement is remembered.

Sharpe and Sortino in Risk-Adjusted Ratios are shown without a “good” threshold, on purpose. Tradelics computes them per trade, while the familiar benchmarks you may have in mind describe annualized values — marking one against the other would paint perfectly healthy accounts red.

11.2 All Metrics Defined

Core Performance

Metric	Definition
Total Trades	Total number of closed trades in the analysis period. Break-even trades are included.
Win Rate	Percentage of trades that were profitable (by net P&L).
Loss Rate	Percentage of trades that were losing trades (by net P&L).
Break Even	Number of trades whose net P&L falls within the break-even tolerance (see the note below).
Win/Loss Ratio	Number of winning trades divided by losing trades.
Profit Factor (shown as “Profit Factor (Gross)”)	Total gross profit divided by total gross loss. Values above 1.0 indicate a net positive system; above 1.5 is considered solid. Displays as ∞ when there are gross wins but no gross losses.
Profit Factor (Net)	The same ratio computed on net figures: net wins divided by the absolute value of net losses.
Net P&L	Net profit/loss after all fees (commission + swap), summed over every trade including break-evens.
Gross P&L	Total profit/loss before fees are deducted, summed over every trade.
Gross Wins	Sum of trades that were winners before fees.
Gross Losses	Sum of trades that were losers before fees.
Net Wins	Sum of trades that were winners after fees.
Net Losses	Sum of trades that were losers after fees.
First / Last Trade Date	The close dates of the earliest and latest trades in the analyzed set.

Two classification details worth knowing. First, the Break Even Tolerance (set in Preferences → Metrics, default 0): a trade whose net P&L is within ±tolerance of zero counts as break-even — it is neither a win nor a loss, but it does stay in the Total Trades denominator. That’s why Win Rate + Loss Rate can add up to less than 100%, and why Net P&L isn’t simply Net Wins + Net Losses. Second, win/loss classification is always by net P&L — except for Gross Wins and Gross Losses, which classify by gross, so a trade whose fees turned a small gross profit into a net loss appears in both Gross Wins and (as a loss) in the net-based counts.

Per-Trade Averages

Metric	Definition
Avg Trade	Average net profit per trade (after all fees deducted).
Avg Win	Average net profit of winning trades (after all fees deducted).
Avg Loss	Average net loss of losing trades (after all fees deducted).
Payoff Ratio	Win amount divided by loss amount — i.e., Average Win ÷ Average Loss.
Expectancy	Average net profit (or loss) you can expect per trade. Calculated as Net P&L ÷ Total Trades — which makes it the same number as Avg Trade; it’s listed under both names because “expectancy” is the term most trading literature uses. Positive means your strategy has an edge; negative means it loses on average.
Expectancy in R	Expected R-multiple per trade: (Win% × Avg Win R) − (Loss% × Avg Loss R). Requires Initial Risk data; break-even trades (R = 0) are left out of both the win and loss sides.
Avg R	The reward-to-risk you actually realized: each trade’s net profit ÷ its initial risk, averaged. Unlike Avg Planned RRR this is signed, so losses pull it down — a full stop-out is −1R. Only calculated for trades where Initial Risk is available.
Avg Planned RRR	The reward-to-risk you planned: take-profit distance ÷ stop-loss distance (|TP − entry| ÷ |entry − SL|), averaged over the trades where you set both levels. Trades without a TP or SL are skipped rather than counted as zero, so this measures the shape of the setups you chose — before the market had any say. Because it compares two distances on the same instrument, contract size and tick value cancel out and the figure is directly comparable across forex, futures and crypto in one journal.
Planned RRR Coverage	The percentage of closed trades that recorded both a take-profit and a stop-loss — in other words, how much of your journal Avg Planned RRR is actually based on. Check it before trusting that ratio: a tidy 3.5 drawn from four trades out of two hundred says very little. Low coverage is itself a finding, since it means most of your trades were taken without a written target to measure against.
Largest Win	Biggest single profitable trade (net profit after fees).
Largest Loss	Biggest single losing trade (net loss after fees).

Read Avg Planned RRR and Avg R side by side — it is the most useful pairing on this page. Planning 3:1 while realizing 0.5R says your entries are fine and your exits are costing you: winners cut early, or stops widened. If the two sit close together, your execution is following the plan and any problem lies in setup selection instead.

Risk & Drawdown

Metric	Definition
Max Drawdown	Largest peak-to-trough decline in your cumulative P&L. Computed on cumulative trade P&L rather than the account balance, so it works the same regardless of your initial balance. Measures the worst losing period in absolute terms.
Max Drawdown %	Max drawdown expressed as a percentage of the peak account balance at the time (falling back to peak cumulative P&L if balance data isn’t available).
Max Drawdown Duration	How long the single largest drawdown lasted, measured from its peak to its lowest point (not to the eventual recovery).
Absolute Drawdown	How far your cumulative P&L fell below its starting point — i.e., the deepest you were ever underwater relative to where you began, not relative to a peak. This is the figure prop firms typically measure against a fixed maximum-loss floor.
Recovery Factor	Net profit divided by max drawdown — higher values mean your gains dwarf your worst losing stretch.
Calmar Ratio	Return relative to worst-case loss. In Tradelics it is computed from the same two inputs as Recovery Factor (net profit ÷ max drawdown), so the two rows show the same value — Calmar is listed for traders who know the metric by that name.
Sharpe Ratio	Risk-adjusted return: mean per-trade P&L divided by the standard deviation of per-trade P&L. Note this is computed on per-trade currency amounts and is not annualized, so it isn’t directly comparable to annualized Sharpe figures quoted for funds — use it to compare your own periods and strategies against each other.
Sortino Ratio	Like Sharpe but only penalizes downside volatility (losses), not upside volatility. Higher is better. Displays as ∞ when there is no downside volatility to measure.
Standard Deviation	Variability of trade P&L — lower means more consistent results trade-to-trade.
Risk of Ruin	Estimated probability of eventually losing your trading capital, derived from your win rate and payoff ratio assuming a standard 2% of capital risked per trade — the calculation uses that fixed assumption rather than your own per-trade risk. The number falls steeply as your edge widens, so anything above a fraction of a percent deserves attention. One threshold matters most: if win rate × payoff ratio no longer covers your loss rate, the edge is gone and this reads a flat 100% — the model’s way of saying that a system with no edge is ruined eventually, whatever the position sizing.
Kelly Criterion	Optimal fraction of capital to risk per trade based on win rate and payoff ratio, shown as a percentage. Floored at 0 — a negative Kelly (no edge) displays as 0%. A guideline only; most traders use half-Kelly or less.

Streaks

Metric	Definition
Max Wins in a Row	Longest consecutive winning streak.
Max Losses in a Row (shown as “Max Consecutive Losses”)	Longest consecutive losing streak.

Streaks follow the order the trades are listed in. Under the default chronological order this is what you’d expect; if you’ve sorted the table by another column, the streak numbers reflect that order instead.

Fees

Metric	Definition
Total Commission	Sum of all trading commissions in the period. Fee totals are signed, so a rebate or credit reduces the total rather than adding to it.
Total Swap	Sum of all overnight holding costs/gains — again signed, so swap credits offset swap charges.
Total Fees	Commission and swap combined.
Avg Commission / Trade	Total commission divided by all trades in the period (including trades that paid none).
Avg Swap / Trade	Total swap divided by all trades in the period.
Avg Slippage	Average difference between planned entry price (order price) and actual fill price, expressed in price units — not currency. The sign is adjusted for direction so that positive always means a worse fill, and market orders (which have no order price) are excluded.

All P&L values in Tradelics are net of fees. This means Avg Trade, Expectancy, Avg Win, Avg Loss, and every other profit-based metric already reflects commission and swap deducted.

Holding Time

Metric	Definition
Avg Holding Time	Average duration trades are held open across all trades in the period.
Avg Win Holding Time	Average duration of winning trades specifically.
Avg Loss Holding Time	Average duration of losing trades specifically.
Median Holding Time	Median (middle value) duration trades are held open — less affected by outlier very long or short trades than the average.

Advanced

Metric	Definition
Cumulative P&L	Running total of trade profits/losses over time — this is your equity curve in number form.
Edge Score	Composite score (0–100) combining expectancy, win rate, drawdown, recovery, and profit factor. See §11.1 above.

MAE / MFE

Metric	Definition
MAE Efficiency	How well you manage adverse moves — average profit relative to max adverse excursion, measured over winning trades only. Higher = better stop placement.
MFE Capture Ratio	How much of favorable price movement you actually capture — average profit relative to max favorable excursion, measured over all trades that had a favorable move. Losing trades drag this ratio down (even negative), which is the point: it shows profit given back.
MAE/MFE Data Coverage	Percentage of trades that have both MAE and MFE data recorded. This data is typically available from MT5 and NinjaTrader exports.
R-Data Coverage	Percentage of trades that have Initial Risk data available for R-multiple calculations.

Psychology & Review

The Psychology page summarizes your Trade Review answers in four headline figures. Each is computed over the reviewed trades that actually answered the relevant question — not over all trades.

Metric	Definition
Reviewed Trades	Number of trades with completed Trade Review responses.
Avg Discipline	Average self-rated discipline score (1–5) across reviewed trades.
Plan Adherence	Percentage of reviewed trades where you reported following your trading plan.
Emotion Free	Percentage of reviewed trades where you answered “Yes” to trading free from emotional influence. Higher is better — emotionally influenced trades usually correlate with worse outcomes.

Every other review question — trade rating, risk-management adherence, mistakes, and the rest — is broken down question by question in the Trader Performance page (see §11.3), which builds a per-question grid across all your reviewed trades.

11.3 Analysis Categories (Sidebar)

The sidebar lists 18 analysis pages: the Dashboard on its own at the top, then three labelled groups. Several pages have sub-tabs of their own — Market and Setup each offer Charts and Tables views, and Time adds a Heatmap alongside them.

Page	What it shows
Dashboard	Your customizable metrics home page — Edge Score gauge, key metric cards, win/loss summary (see §11.1)
Breakdown
Market	Performance broken down by trading instrument (pair/symbol), as charts or tables
Setup	Performance by Strategy, Signal, and Confirmation labels — reveals which setups actually work
Time	Performance by hour of day, day of week, month, and session — including a heatmap grid showing where you make and lose money
Performance	Rolling performance windows over recent months, weeks, and days. How many of each are shown is set in Preferences → Metrics → Performance View Periods
Balances	Account balance history and running equity tracking per account
Monthly Returns	Month-by-month P&L table and cumulative return chart
Deep Analysis
Trader Performance	A question-by-question grid of your Trade Review answers across all reviewed trades — how your self-assessments relate to results
MAE / MFE	Maximum Adverse/Favorable Excursion charts — see how far against you each trade went before closing
Equity Curves	Account balance progression over time with drawdown periods highlighted
P/L Distribution	Histogram of trade outcomes — the shape reveals whether you have fat tails (large wins/losses) or a tight distribution
Correlations	Correlation matrix between instruments — reveals whether your trades are diversified or clustered
Psychology	Analysis of Trade Review responses — emotion vs. performance, discipline vs. win rate, revenge-trading detection (see §11.5)
Checklists	Pre-trade and post-trade checklist templates for systematic trade review
Insights
Insights	Automatically generated textual insights and observations about your trading patterns
Playbook	Trade setup catalog grouped by Signal label, showing historical P&L, win rate, and avg holding time per setup
What-If	Scenario analysis: “What if I had removed my 10 worst trades?”, “What if I had exited at MFE peak?”
Export	Export all metrics and charts to PDF, Excel, or CSV

The day-by-day Calendar isn’t in this sidebar — it’s a main view of its own, reached with Ctrl+1 or the Calendar toolbar button (see §10).

11.4 MAE / MFE Analysis

MAE (Maximum Adverse Excursion) is the maximum amount a trade moved against you before it closed. MFE (Maximum Favorable Excursion) is the maximum amount a trade moved in your favor before it closed.

These metrics require excursion data for each trade, which not every broker provides — it is typically available from MT5 and NinjaTrader exports. The coverage percentage is shown as MAE/MFE Data Coverage.

11.5 Psychology Analysis

The Psychology page (Metrics → Psychology) aggregates your Trade Review responses and surfaces behavioral patterns:

• Win Rate by Emotion: How does your performance change with your emotional state — do “Calm” trades outperform “Fear” or “Greed” trades?
• Win Rate by Discipline: Your win rate broken down by self-rated discipline level (1–5) — the clearest picture of whether discipline actually pays in your trading.
• Plan followed vs. not followed: A side-by-side comparison of results on trades where you stuck to the plan against trades where you broke it.
• Revenge Trading Detection: Compares performance on trades taken right after 3+ consecutive losses against your normal trades. Needs at least 10 closed trades with P&L before it activates.

Remember that these breakdowns are built from reviewed trades that answered the relevant question — the more consistently you fill in reviews, the more trustworthy the patterns.

The Psychology tab becomes most valuable after you’ve reviewed 30+ trades. Fill in Trade Reviews consistently — even 2 minutes per trade gives you meaningful data over time.

12. Filtering Trades

Press Ctrl+6 or click Filter in the toolbar to open the Filter panel.

Filters apply across all views simultaneously. When a filter is active, the Trades view, Trade Details, Calendar, Metrics, and Reports all show only the filtered subset of trades. This lets you analyze any slice of your trading history with the full power of all views.

The Filter panel is a condition builder: each row is a Field / Condition / Value triple, and you can stack as many rows as you like with Add Filter. A results label in the panel shows how many trades match the current conditions; Clear All returns to the full journal.

You can tell at a glance whether anything is filtered without opening the panel: a status label sits beside the Filter button in the toolbar, reading No Filters when you’re seeing the whole journal.

Nearly every trade field is filterable — account, symbol, direction, open and close time, profit, commission, quantity, status, labels, tags, and more. The available conditions adapt to the field’s type: date fields get before/after/between, numeric fields get greater/less/equals, text fields get contains, and so on. Some examples of what a single condition can do:

You want	Condition to build
One account only	account is MyAccount
A date range	openTime (or closeTime) between two dates — handy for a specific month, quarter, or challenge period
Only EURUSD trades	pair is EURUSD
Only winners	profit greater than 0
Only actual trades (no deposits/withdrawals)	orderType is trade
Trades carrying a tag	tags contains Revenge Trade

Filtering by Trade Review answers

Perhaps the most powerful thing in the panel: every Trade Review question is available as a filter field. Yes/no and choice questions filter with is / is not / contains; the 1–5 rating questions support numeric comparisons. Want to see every trade where you rated your discipline 2 or lower, or every trade you admitted was a FOMO entry? Two clicks.

Saved filters

Filter sets can be saved by name and reloaded from a dropdown — build your go-to slices (“This month’s shorts”, “Rule breaks”, “A+ setups only”) once and switch between them instantly. You can also temporarily deactivate individual conditions without deleting them, and toggle whether inactive conditions are shown, so a complex filter can be parked and revived at will.

Combine conditions for powerful analysis. Example: “Short trades on GBPUSD using my ‘Supply Zone’ signal in Q1 2025” — then open Metrics to see the stats for that exact combination.

13. Reports

Press Ctrl+5 or click Report in the toolbar to open the Report View.

The report is an HTML-based formatted document that shows your trades in a professional layout, including:

• Trade details: symbol, direction, entry/exit times, prices, P&L, commission, swap
• Trade comments and notes
• Image gallery screenshots embedded inline
• Trade Review answers (if completed)
• P&L summary

The report respects the active filter — filter to a specific period or strategy before opening the report to generate a focused export.

Export Formats

Format	Button	Best for
PDF	Export → PDF	Sharing with mentors, prop firm submission, printing, archiving.
Word (.docx)	Export → Word	Editing the report, adding your own commentary, submitting to a trading coach.

Customizing the Report

The report’s content and appearance are configured in Preferences → Report — the Report view itself only carries a zoom slider, which adjusts the on-screen preview without affecting the exported file.

• Fields: Every trade field can be toggled on or off, so the report shows exactly what you want and nothing more.
• Layout: Fields can be reordered with ↑↓, and grouped onto shared rows (up to four side by side) by giving them the same row number.
• Trade Header Fields: A separate set of fields for the colored header strip above each trade.
• Font Size and Image Size: Small / Medium / Large / XL — text size throughout the report, and how large your trade screenshots appear inline.

For a weekly review with your trading coach or mentor: apply a date filter for the past week, open the Report View, and export to PDF. Your screenshots, notes, and Trade Review answers will all be included in one clean document.

14. Preferences

Open Preferences with Ctrl+, (comma) or File → Preferences.

Preferences are organized into six sections: Appearance, Regional, Sync/Import, System, Metrics, and Report.

Appearance

Choose from three themes:

Theme	Best for
Light	Default. Bright environments, printing reports, users who prefer a traditional app appearance.
Dark Blue	Easy on the eyes during long sessions, good for multi-monitor setups with other dark-themed platforms (MT5, TradingView).
Dark Black	Maximum contrast dark theme. Ideal for OLED screens or users who prefer pure black backgrounds.

Theme changes apply immediately without requiring a restart. The Appearance section also holds:

• Toolbar labels — hide the text labels for a compact, icon-only toolbar (tooltips remain).
• Trade Details Layout — arrange the three panels of Trade Details (Trade Form, Image Gallery, Strategy & Labels) in any of six orders.
• Startup — whether to show the welcome screen on startup and whether to reopen your last journal automatically.

Regional Settings

Configure how numbers, dates, and times are displayed throughout the app — plus a few settings that reach further than formatting.

Setting	Options & Effect
Number Format	US / UK: 1,234.56 (dot as decimal separator) Germany: 1.234,56 (comma as decimal separator) France: 1 234,56 (space + comma) Japan: 1,234.56 (same as US but affects currency symbol placement)
Date Format	Six formats: yyyy-MM-dd, dd.MM.yyyy, MM/dd/yyyy, dd. MMM yyyy, MMM dd, yyyy, dd/MM/yyyy. Affects all date displays and inputs.
Time Format	12-hour (e.g., 2:30 PM) or 24-hour (14:30).
Calendar start day	Whether calendar weeks begin on Sunday or Monday.
Default Currency	The base currency for all multi-currency aggregation — when trades span accounts in different currencies, combined metrics are converted to and shown in this currency (see §3.5).
Language	The app’s display language. Changing it prompts a restart-style notice to fully apply.

Number Format is a display setting — CSV import auto-detects whether a file uses US or European decimal separators, and custom mappings carry their own number format, so a mismatched preference won’t corrupt an import.

There is no display-timezone setting here, and trade times are not converted when they are displayed — each trade is converted to your computer’s time zone once, as it is synced or imported, and stored that way. What varies between accounts is the broker’s clock, set per account as Server time zone (§3.3), with its default under Sync/Import below.

Sync/Import Settings

Setting	Description
Auto-sync Notifications	Show a toast notification when a background auto-sync adds or updates trades. Off = auto-sync runs completely silently.
Server time zone	The default broker server time zone — used by every account left on Use default, which is how accounts start out. Almost every forex server uses EET/EEST, which is what Tradelics assumes. An account that picks its own zone ignores this (see §3.3). The figure in brackets is how far ahead that zone is of your computer right now — a reading, not the setting.
MT5 account-switch policy	What to do when a sync needs MT5 to switch to a different login: Ask me first, Switch without asking, or Never switch. Applies only to connections that hold credentials — one that reads the open session can never switch. See §4.2.

Auto-sync itself — the on/off toggle and the interval — lives on each broker connection in the Account Dialog, not here, alongside its Start MetaTrader 5 when syncing setting. The account’s own server time zone sits in the Account Details section of the same dialog. See §4.7, §4.2 and §3.3.

System Settings

Setting	Description
Automatic Update Checks	When enabled, Tradelics checks for new versions in the background (about once every 24 hours). You can always check manually via Help → Check for Updates. This is a safety net rather than the way updates arrive — see the note below.

Updates install themselves. Tradelics comes from the Microsoft Store, and Windows keeps it current — a new version usually arrives on its own within a day, with nothing for you to download or run. The update check exists for the cases Windows does not reach: Store updates switched off, a metered connection deferring them, or Tradelics left running across a release. When it does find something, it opens the Store listing so Windows can install it. Never install Tradelics from a downloaded package file — that installs a second copy alongside your Store one instead of updating it, and the copy never updates again.

Metrics Settings

Setting	Description
Break Even Tolerance	The most consequential metrics setting. Trades whose net P&L is within ±this amount of zero are classified as break-even — counted in neither wins nor losses, though they remain in Total Trades. The default is 0 (only an exactly-zero trade is break-even). Raise it if tiny residual P&L amounts — a few cents of rounding, or a broker’s break-even stop-outs — are polluting your win/loss stats. See the classification note in §11.2.
Performance View Periods	How many recent months, weeks, and days the Metrics → Performance page displays.

Report Settings

Everything about the report’s content and layout — field toggles, row grouping, ordering, header fields, font size, and image size. Covered in detail in §13.

15. Licensing & Activation

Trial Period

When you install Tradelics for the first time, you can start a free trial with full access to all features. No credit card or account required — an email address is optional. Accepting the license agreement is part of the same screen, and starting the trial needs an internet connection (the app validates offline afterwards).

• Remaining trial days are shown in the license screen and the title bar.
• Your data is fully accessible throughout the trial and after activation — nothing is lost when you activate.
• If you don’t activate before the trial ends, Tradelics shows the activation screen on startup. Your journals remain safe; you just need to activate to continue using the app.
• The trial is one per device: reinstalling Tradelics does not grant a fresh trial. If you’ve already used yours, the app will tell you so.

Activating a License

1. Purchase a license key from tradelics.com.
2. Open the activation screen — it appears automatically on startup whenever the app isn’t yet licensed.
3. Enter your license key in the input field.
4. Click Activate. Tradelics connects to the license server to validate the key.
5. On success, the app opens normally. Your key is now bound to this device.

Keep your license key in a safe place (password manager, email backup). You’ll need it if you transfer to a new computer.

Device Binding & Transfer

Each license key is bound to one device at a time. If you buy a new computer or reinstall Windows, you can transfer your license.

1. Install Tradelics on the new computer.
2. Enter your license key on the activation screen.
3. If the key is already active on another device, Tradelics tells you so and asks whether you’d like to transfer it. Confirm, and a confirmation email is sent to your registered address.
4. Open the email and click the confirmation link. The link is valid for 24 hours.
5. Return to Tradelics — the confirmation dialog is still waiting — and click OK. Activation completes on the spot; you don’t need to enter your key again. (Clicked OK before the email? Just use Try Again once you’ve confirmed.)

Transferring moves the key to the new device — the old machine loses its activation as part of the process. Make sure you no longer need Tradelics on the old computer before confirming.

License States

State	What it means
Licensed	Active license. Full access, no restrictions.
Trial Active	Free trial in progress. Full access. Days remaining shown in UI.
Trial Not Started	No trial has been used on this device — the license screen offers to start one.
Trial Expired	Trial period has ended. Activation screen shown on startup. Data is safe — activate to continue.

16. Keyboard Shortcuts

Category	Shortcut	Action
File
	Ctrl+N	New journal
	Ctrl+O	Open journal
	Ctrl+W	Close journal
	Ctrl+Shift+S	Save journal as (backup copy)
	Ctrl+S	Sync accounts
	Ctrl+I	Import transactions
	Ctrl+,	Open Preferences
	Ctrl+Shift+R	Repair journal
	Ctrl+Q	Exit application
Edit
	Ctrl++	Add transaction
	Ctrl+−	Delete transaction
	Delete / Backspace	Delete selected rows (Trades)
View
	Ctrl+A	Accounts manager
	Ctrl+L	Labels manager
	Ctrl+Y	Symbols / Pairs manager
	Ctrl+1	Calendar View
	Ctrl+2	Trades
	Ctrl+3	Trade Details
	Ctrl+4	Metrics & Statistics
	Ctrl+5	Report View
	Ctrl+6	Filter
Trade Details Navigation
	Ctrl+←	Previous trade
	Ctrl+→	Next trade

Number-based shortcuts also work with the numeric keypad — Ctrl+NumPad 1–6 and NumPad + / − behave the same as their main-keyboard counterparts.

17. Troubleshooting

Sync Issues

Import Issues

Performance & Stability

Licensing Issues

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Tradelics — Professional Trading Journal & Analytics
www.tradelics.com