Workflow5 min read
A video review workflow for your trading journal
A written journal records what you think happened. A clip records what happened. Here is a weekly review routine built around your own trade recordings.
By TradeClip Team · Published
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Most trading journals are written after the fact. You close the position, you open a spreadsheet or a notes app, and you write down what you remember: the setup, the reason, the result. The trouble is that memory edits. The entry that felt patient at the time turns out to have been three candles early, and the "quick exit" took forty seconds of hovering over the button. A recording does not edit. This post describes a review workflow that uses your own clips as the primary source and the written journal as the index.
Why video, and why automatic#
Manual screen recording works until it does not. You forget to press record on the trade that mattered, or you record four hours of flat chart to catch ten minutes of activity and never watch any of it. TradeClip removes both problems by recording per trade: it watches the chart window you chose, starts a clip when it detects an entry, and finishes it after the confirmed close. In the default on-trade mode nothing is written while you are flat. Optional rolling mode adds pre-roll so the setup is in the clip too.
Every clip carries the facts the detector read from the chart: symbol,
direction, size, and the profit or loss as displayed, sampled through the
trade. Clips live in ~/Movies/TradeClip/Clips/ on this computer, one folder
per trade, and the library shows them with a thumbnail and those facts. That
is the raw material for a review.
The routine#
The routine below assumes a weekly review, with the daily part taking only a few minutes. Adjust it to your own volume; a swing trader may do this monthly.
Each session: name the setup, do not judge#
When the session ends, open the library and look at the day's clips. For each one, write a line in your journal that names the setup you thought you were trading, not the outcome: "Breakout retest", "opening range", "news fade". Key the line with the clip's symbol and time, which are on the card, so the recording and the note can find each other later. Resist writing "good" or "bad". The P&L is on the card already, and attaching a verdict now is exactly the kind of after-the-fact editing you are trying to avoid.
The desktop app does not have a notes field on a clip today, and that is not an accident of the first release so much as a division of labour: the app keeps the evidence, the journal keeps the interpretation. That is the whole daily job.
Weekly: watch the recordings, not the summaries#
Set aside a block of time and watch the week's clips in order. Play the automatic save at real speed at least once; the recording keeps every retained second at 1x on purpose, because the market moved at the pace it moved and a sped-up version hides the hesitation and the waiting.
While you watch, look for three things:
- The gap between plan and action. Where did you enter relative to the level you would have named beforehand? Did you add, and was that planned? The clip's markers, entry, add, partial and exit, make this easy to scrub to.
- The management in the middle. This is the part a written journal almost never captures. Watch what you did between entry and exit. Did you move a stop? The recording shows your screen, so an order line that moved is visible even though the app does not draw stop and target changes onto the clip yet.
- The exit and the seconds after it. Did you leave before the reason to be in the trade was gone, or after? What did the chart do in the post-roll?
Take notes against the setup names, not the individual trades. "On breakout retests, I entered early four times out of six" is a pattern you can act on. "Trade 14 was bad" is not.
Monthly: slice by instrument, by time and by result#
Once you have a few weeks of clips and setup notes, slice them. The desktop library's search box finds clips by ticker, so start there and watch how one instrument has treated you. Each card shows when the clip was captured and the P&L the detector read, so with the journal open beside it you can pull out the first hour of the day, or the largest losses, and watch them back to back. That is uncomfortable and useful. Then do the largest wins, which is more pleasant and often just as revealing: winners that were taken for reasons you cannot explain are not a strategy. The cloud library, if you opt into it, adds time-window and P&L filters on top of the ticker search.
Making the review honest#
A few habits keep the workflow from becoming a highlight reel.
Keep every clip. The temptation is to delete the ugly ones. Those are the ones with the information. Deleting a clip in TradeClip removes it from the library and its folder from disk, and a tombstone stops a recovered recording from bringing it back, so treat deletion as final and reserve it for clips that are genuinely noise.
Watch losers first. If you watch winners first you will be in a good mood by the time the losers come up and you will forgive them. Reverse the order.
Write the pattern, then the fix, then the test. A pattern is a sentence about your behaviour. A fix is a change to your process. A test is how you will know, from next month's clips, whether the fix took. Without the test, the fix is a resolution, and resolutions do not survive the next volatile open.
Do not confuse the P&L readout with the lesson. The number the detector read from the chart is what was on the screen, shown as it was shown. A clip whose readout ends with a plus can still document a mistake, and a clip that ends with a minus can document a decision you should make again.
Sharing a review without sharing everything#
Sometimes a clip is worth showing someone: a mentor, a trading group, or a
future version of you. The clip editor lets you cut, reorder and change speed,
add text rows, and export in vertical, portrait, square or landscape shapes.
Caption variables such as {symbol} and {side} fill in from the recorded
facts, so the export says what the clip says and nothing more.
Two things are worth knowing before you share. First, an export is a recording of your screen, and TradingView windows can show account details beyond the chart; frame the capture region so the export shows what you intend. Second, exports on the trial and Pro plans carry the TradeClip watermark; Ultra exports are clean.
Where the app stops and you begin#
TradeClip's job is narrow. It records the trades you take and keeps the facts it read from the chart attached to each one. It does not score your trades, it does not tell you what to do differently, and it will not pretend to know a number it did not see. The review is yours. The recordings just make it harder to argue with.
