Reviewing risk with your own clips

On this page

1. What a recording can and cannot tell you
2. Question one: was the risk defined before the entry?
3. Question two: did the risk stay defined?
4. Question three: was the size the size you planned?
5. Question four: what did the exit cost, in time?
6. Turning answers into a process
7. A word on the numbers on screen
8. What this review is not

There is a version of risk review that consists of a column in a spreadsheet: planned risk, actual loss, a ratio. It is useful and it is incomplete, because the number in the "actual" column is the end of a process, and the process is where risk decisions are made. Recordings show the process. This post is about using them to ask a small number of questions, honestly, about what you did.

What a recording can and cannot tell you#

A TradeClip clip is a recording of the chart window you chose, from the detected entry to the confirmed close, plus any pre-roll and post-roll. Along with the video it carries the facts the detector read from the chart: symbol, direction, size, and the profit or loss as it was displayed, sampled through the trade. It also records confirmed take-profit and stop-loss levels, though the app does not yet draw changes to those levels onto the clip.

What it cannot tell you is anything the chart did not show. It does not know your account size, your fill price if the chart did not display one, or what you intended. That is fine. Intent is your part of the review; the recording supplies the behaviour.

Question one: was the risk defined before the entry?#

Watch the seconds before the entry marker. If you recorded in rolling mode the setup is in the clip; in on-trade mode the clip starts at the confirmed entry, so this question becomes "what was on the screen at the first frame".

Look for a stop. Was there an order line on the chart before or immediately after the position appeared, or did the stop arrive later, after the position had already moved? A recording is unforgiving here in a way memory is not. Many traders remember placing a stop "right away" and discover, on watching, that "right away" was after the first adverse move.

Note the answer against the setup, not the trade. If a pattern emerges, for example that stops are defined promptly on planned setups and late on impulsive ones, that is a process finding you can do something with.

Question two: did the risk stay defined?#

This is the question a written journal almost never answers and a recording answers directly. Scrub from the entry marker to the exit marker and watch the stop line. Did it move? In which direction? At what point in the trade?

Moving a stop away from price to avoid being taken out is one of the most common ways a defined risk becomes an undefined one, and it is nearly invisible in a spreadsheet, because the final loss is just a bigger number with no story attached. In a clip it is a moment you can point at. The unrealized P&L readout, if you have a layout element or a {upnl} caption on the clip, shows what the position looked like when the decision was made.

TradeClip records the confirmed level changes on disk as a timeline, but the overlay does not annotate them yet. Watch the chart itself; the order line is part of the recording of your screen.

Question three: was the size the size you planned?#

The detector reads the position size from TradingView's label at entry and records adds and partial exits as events. Compare the recorded size with the size you would have named beforehand for that setup. Then look at adds. Was the add planned, or was it a response to the position going against you?

There is no judgement built into the app about any of this. The {quantity} variable shows the observed size, and the add and partial markers show when it changed. The interpretation is yours.

Question four: what did the exit cost, in time?#

Time is a form of risk that spreadsheets usually skip. The elapsed timer in a layout, or the {elapsed} caption, counts from entry. Two clips with the same result and very different durations are different trades. When you review, look at the long ones: was the hold a plan, or was it a refusal to take the loss that was available earlier?

The post-roll after the exit is useful too. It shows what the chart did after you were out, at real speed, which is the honest answer to "should I have stayed in" and usually a less dramatic one than the version you remember.

Turning answers into a process#

A useful review produces a short list of process statements, not a list of trades. Something like:

• On the setups I tag "opening range", the stop is placed before the entry.
• On any other setup, the stop is placed within the first candle or the trade is closed.
• A stop is never moved away from price. If the level is wrong, the trade is wrong.
• Adds happen only on the setups that plan for them.

Each statement should be testable against next month's recordings. That is the point of doing this with clips rather than with memory: next month you can search the library by setup tag, watch the entries in sequence, and see whether the statement held. If it did not, the recording will show you where it broke.

A word on the numbers on screen#

The profit-and-loss readouts in a clip are the values the detector read from the chart, held between readings and never interpolated. An unobserved value renders as an em dash rather than a guess. This matters in a risk review for one reason: a chart that showed a smaller drawdown than you felt is telling you something about the feeling, and a chart that showed a bigger one than you remember is telling you something about the memory. In both cases the recording is the more reliable witness, and it is worth deferring to it.

What this review is not#

It is not a scoring system, and TradeClip does not offer one. It is not a substitute for understanding the instruments you trade or the rules of the venue you trade them on. And it is not a promise that better process produces better results; markets do not owe anyone that. What the review offers is narrower and more durable: a way to know, from evidence rather than recollection, whether you did what you meant to do.