Act I Before the open ~~· the Today page~~

An entry and a stop become a share count

Tomorrow's ideas go in a grid. Type the entry and the stop, pick how much of the account's risk budget the idea gets, and the share count is already there. No spreadsheet, no arithmetic at 9:28.

Entry + stop + risk mode → shares, instantly: one account risk unit, half a unit, or a custom dollar or percent amount.
The setup's playbook rules sit beside the plan. Breakout rules on screen while you plan a breakout.
A focus list for the handful of names you're actually watching, kept apart from the full idea grid.
Your track record on the setup, such as "4-for-5," read off the trades you already journaled.
A pre-trade reminder from your own analytics: mistake hot-spots, best setup windows, weekday edge.
Mark an idea "Entered" and it becomes a tracked trade with its stop, setup, and thesis. Or import the broker CSV afterwards and let the matcher rebuild it.

CrucibleTrade · Today · where the sizing math lives

The Today page: a tile for all accounts and one for each account, each with the risk it carries, the room left before its limit and its unrealized P/L, both accounts badged Caution with new ideas defaulting to half size, beside 30-day playbook adherence. Under them a strip names three positions with no working stop, then the open-positions book lists nine positions with their stops, trade P/L, R now and R if stopped, totalling $3,691.49 of trade P/L and −$5,246.30 if every stop fills, with six of nine protected.

Act II During the day ~~· the open book~~

Know your open risk without a spreadsheet

This is the hour incumbent journals skip. Positions are on, you're scaling in and out, and the question is not what your P/L was last month. It's how much you have at risk right now, and whether you should be adding at all.

Account tiles pinned to the Today page: open risk, room left before each limit, unrealized P/L, and where the book lands if every stop fills. Positions with no stop are named, not counted as zero.
The open-position book: every open trade on any date, with its current stop, its initial risk, and what it's costing or making.
A scale-in / scale-out ledger that keeps track of what you've banked and what's still on.
Break-even in one click: move the stop to your average entry and watch the trade stop being able to hurt you.
"Risk left" per account: how much of today's, this week's, and this month's risk budget you have already committed.
One throttle per account: Clear → Caution → Cool-down → Locked, from your losing streak, recent R, open risk, and your own limits. It sizes new ideas down to half a unit; it never blocks an entry.
Prices refresh when you ask, or you type your own marks. Price downloads ship off, and open P/L, open risk and the throttle all work without a feed. No streaming tape, no market-data subscription.

CrucibleTrade · Today · the throttle and the risk budget

The Today page's ideas sheet under the pinned account tiles: four active ideas as cards, each with the symbol's record in trades, win rate and total R, how its setup is trading and when it was last traded, then one editable row per idea with account, setup, entry, stop, dollar risk, shares and position size beside a Record entry button. The footer reads 'If all 2 Focus ideas trigger: $85.30', because an idea never enters open risk until its entry is recorded.

Stops move. Your R math shouldn't lie.

The moment you trail a stop, a tool that measures R against the current stop quietly rewrites your whole track record. Every expectancy number downstream is then wrong, and it's wrong in the flattering direction.

01 · R STAYS ANCHORED

R stays anchored to your initial stop. The denominator never quietly rewrites itself when you trail.

02 · SPLIT STOPS

Split a stop across up to three lots: trail one, park one at break-even.

03 · WORST CASE

The worst case recomputes as you scale out. Know the moment a trade can't hurt you.

CrucibleTrade · Today · a split stop, mid-scale-out

A split stop on the Today page: the scale-out panel for an NVDL short, 225 shares open at a $57.29 average, showing the current price, +$940.05 of trade P/L, the $54.90 1R level measured off the initial stop, and +$338.40 if stopped, because its current stop runs in two legs, 135 shares at $54.78 and 90 at $57.29. Below are the stop controls and Record cover / Record short; beside it the trade chart draws both legs' stops on 2-minute candles.

Mid-scale-out: part of the original size is still on. The stop is split into two legs at two prices, so one part of the position can be protected differently from the rest. The panel prints what the position makes or loses if that stop is hit, so the worst case is a number rather than a guess. The 1R line stays where the trade opened it, measured off the initial stop, so its R-multiple means the same thing on the last day that it meant on the first.

Act III After the close ~~· the review room~~

See what breaking your own rules costs you

Not "how did I do?" Every journal answers that. The question is whether the discipline is paying, in dollars, and whether it's getting better.

The daily ritual

Close the day in 30 seconds

A "Close the day" button at the top of the Today page opens the panel. It grades the day's process straight from your ledger, asks how you were, takes one optional line, and suggests a grade.

Graded on process, not P/L. A red day with every rule followed is an A. A green day that broke your daily cap is not.
Seven checks, auto-graded from the ledger: risk against the daily rules, risk per trade, unplanned entries, entries against the throttle, widened stops, whether you played the book, and the review backlog.
One line on how you were: Sharp, OK, or Off, and a sentence to your tomorrow self.

CrucibleTrade · Today · Close the day

The 'Close the day' panel, auto-graded from the ledger: new risk taken against the $1,250 daily new-risk cap, whether the day's entries were planned, whether any were taken while the throttle said stand down, whether any stop was widened, whether the trades were graded against the playbook, and a warning that trades are waiting in the review queue. It includes Sharp / OK / Off buttons, a one-line prompt, a suggested grade of B, and the note that P/L stays out of it because this grades process, not money.

Trade Review

Every trade, on the chart it actually traded

CrucibleTrade caches the bars and rebuilds the tape you traded, with recent trades on 2-minute candles and older swings on daily, so you can see whether you bought the breakout or chased it, and where your stop really should have been.

Entry & exit markers on real 2-minute to daily candles, with both stop lines: the one you started with and the one you ended with.
Anchored VWAP & moving averages for open-day, prior-day, and 5-day context.
Your playbook as a checklist right on the chart. Grade each rule Followed, Broke, or N/A, with a "what happened?" note.
A guided queue flags trades missing a setup, a behavior tag, a stop basis, or notes. Keyboard-driven, with review status set in bulk across any filter, so a 500-trade history is a workflow instead of a wall.
Setup, mistake & lesson tags that feed straight into the Playbook and the reports below.

CrucibleTrade · Trade Review · working the queue

Trade Review: a PANW long opened 07/31/26 at 11:39 AM in the Sample IRA, still open and needing review, with $44.08 of trade P/L and 0.20R ($16.18) banked by two partial exits, replayed on 2-minute candles from saved bars with downloads off. The chart marks the 10-share entry at $327.19, both exits near $331 and the $319.20 initial stop, with a 5-day moving average and the open-day and prior-day anchored VWAPs.

CrucibleTrade · Trade Review · grading a broken rule

Trade Review of the selected UPRO short from 09/16/26, a −1.20R loss tagged with two behaviors, No clear setup and No sell plan. Its rule checklist reads 60% followed: both entry rules marked broken, the stop, risk and target rules followed. Beside it is the review queue of 344 closed trades sorted by priority, the largest losses first.

Adherence & mistake cost

Put a dollar figure on your discipline

Once trades are graded against your own rules, the arithmetic is available: what a followed-all trade is worth versus a trade where you deviated. That gap is the discipline edge, it heads the Playbook, and it is the number this whole app exists to show you.

Followed-all vs. deviation expectancy, side by side, with the per-trade dollar gap between them across the top of the Playbook.
Setups ranked by edge: trades taken, win rate with scratches split out, expectancy, average R, and adherence to that setup's rules. Bucketed Strong / Watch / Avoid.
What deviating costs: every behavior you tag in review, priced by the trades it touched and ranked against the rest.
Multi-tag mistake cost that reconciles to the penny. A trade that broke two rules is shown both ways, net and attributed, and the attributed total adds up to your actual net P/L.

CrucibleTrade · Playbook · setups ranked by edge

The Playbook's Setups tab: 85.0% adherence over the last 30 days, 17 of 20 graded trades following every rule, a 0.42R average on those against −0.89R on 3 graded deviations, and 7 reasons flagged for attention. Below, ten ruled setups with their rule counts, trades, win rate, expectancy, average R, recent trend, adherence and a verdict from Strong through Weak Overall / Improving to Avoid / Improve, each with the reason it landed there.

CrucibleTrade · Playbook · what deviating costs

The Playbook's Behaviors tab: a behavior cost table listing every tag you use for a deviation in review, from chasing and ignoring a stop to exiting too early, with how often each occurred, the P/L attributed to it, its average R impact and when it last appeared.

Discipline by month

And the only question after that: am I improving?

Every closed day, graded on process, under a month-by-month strip tracking two numbers: how much of your playbook you followed, and what deviating cost you.

Adherence month by month: the figures climb as your process tightens up, flagged improving when the trend holds.
Mistake & rule-break cost shrinking toward zero as the bad habits fade.
Every graded day in one list: A, B and C cards with streak counts, the line you wrote that evening, and the one thing that cost you the grade.

CrucibleTrade · Playbook · Days

The Playbook's Process tab: the last 30 closed day cards counted as 3 A's, 23 B's and 4 C's beside an A-run counter, and a 'Discipline by month' strip from April to September reading 94.0%, 98.8%, 94.4%, 99.0%, 96.1% and 96.8% adherence, the cost of deviating running −$887.31, −$909.25, −$4,189.32, −$919.80, $161.05 and −$959.30, with the trend flagged improving. Below it, a timeline of day cards and review lessons, newest first, each day with its grade, how the trader felt and the note written that evening.

Eleven report lenses

Every angle on your edge

The same trades, sliced eleven ways: the overall curve, then by symbol, setup, sector, size, distribution, hold time, time of day, month by month, calendar and excursion, all behind one filter bar and all exportable to CSV.

A trade that went nowhere isn't filed as a loss. Anything inside a scratch band you set (|R| ≤ 0.1 by default) counts as a scratch: it doesn't dent your win rate, break a streak, or push the throttle toward cool-down.

R-multiple distribution histogram with selectable bin width and an R / percent toggle. — **R-multiple distribution.** The shape of the edge behind the single expectancy number: tight losses near −1R and a healthy right tail.

Performance grouped by how long trades were held, from intraday to one month or more. — **Hold time.** Whether your edge lives in quick trades or longer swings, across every bucket from intraday to a month-plus, plus a setup × hold-time matrix.

Time-of-day and day-of-week performance in 30-minute or hourly bins, by entry or exit time. — **Timing.** The time of day and weekday you trade best, in 30-minute or hourly bins, by entry or exit.

Month-by-month performance with a running cumulative, win rate, expectancy, and best and worst day. — **Monthly performance.** How consistent you are month to month, with a running cumulative and each month's best and worst day.

MAE versus MFE scatter computed from cached intraday bars, winners green and losers red. — **MAE / MFE excursion.** How much heat you took versus how much was on the table, computed from cached intraday bars for every trade.

Cumulative realized P/L curve with drawdown shading and max / current drawdown, plus a dollar / percent toggle. — **Equity & drawdown.** Cumulative realized P/L with high-water-mark drawdown shading, max and current drawdown, and a $ / % toggle.

Symbol performance on the By symbol tab: a summary strip of symbols traded, closed trades, net P/L and the best, worst and most-traded symbol, above a table of every ticker with its evidence count, average R, profit factor, total R, recent direction and last trade date, any two of which can be compared side by side. — **Symbol performance.** Which tickers you actually trade well, by evidence count, average R, profit factor, total R and recent direction, with a drill-down into each symbol's recent trades and any two compared side by side.

Sector performance report: trades grouped across nine sectors with net P/L, win rate and R, showing which corners of the market pay and which to avoid. — **Sector breakdown.** Where your edge concentrates across nine sectors, built from per-ticker metadata with no manual tagging required.

Company-size performance report: trades grouped by large, mid, small cap and ETF with net P/L, win rate and R, revealing which market-cap tiers suit your style. — **Company size.** Whether you trade large caps, small caps, or leveraged ETFs best, so you can lean into the tier that fits your style.

Daily P/L calendar: a weekday heatmap of realized profit and loss with green and red days, week-to-date totals, trade and execution counts, a small A, B or C badge on the days you graded, and the month's best and worst sessions surfaced automatically. — **Daily P/L calendar.** An Analytics tab, not a separate page. The month appears as a weekday heatmap with week-to-date totals and the best and worst sessions surfaced, each graded day carrying its A, B or C badge so the money and the process sit in one grid. Scale-out aware: a partial exit lands on the day the reducing fill happened.

Before you import anything

See a full year of trades before you import your own.

A fresh install opens a complete sample journal: a year of trades across two accounts, a written playbook, every report populated, and charts that work offline. Browsing it never starts the trial clock.

STOP 01 · BEFORE

Size an idea

Open the Today page: ideas in every status, each sized to its account's risk budget, with plan notes that explain how an entry and a stop became a share count.

STOP 02 · DURING

Work the open book

Eight open positions with trailed stops, a two-leg split stop mid-scale-out, and each account throttled by its own status: the day as it actually looks.

STOP 03 · AFTER

Close the day, read the lesson

Most days are already graded; the newest is left open so you can try the 30-second ritual. Each closed trade's notes show what went well, what went wrong, and one change.

STOP 04 · THE ARC

Watch discipline pay

The sample trader has an arc: early months carry broken rules and losses that ran past stops; later months grade higher. The Playbook's discipline-by-month strip reads up and to the right.

CrucibleTrade · Analytics · Overview · the whole sample year

Analytics Overview loaded with the bundled sample: net return, time-weighted return, profit factor, win rate, streaks and R-multiples, above a realized P/L curve.

CrucibleTrade · Playbook · Coach's log

Further down the Playbook's process timeline: graded day cards interleaved with a dated feed of the lessons written in review, each tagged as a day note or with the ticker it came from, pairing what the trade taught with the change to make next time, and filterable to day cards or coach notes.

Opens automatically on a fresh install, and again from Settings → Backup / Restore → Load Full Sample Database. Clear it to import or start empty.

Under the hood

Serious tooling, zero busywork

Seven workspaces (Today, Trades, Review, Playbook, Analytics, Accounts, Settings) handle the unglamorous parts so your time goes into reviewing, not bookkeeping.

Import & data

Thinkorswim / Schwab account statement CSV
Fidelity history & ATP order enrichment
LIFO execution → trade matching that survives re-imports
Broker timezone normalization
Multi-account, multi-broker, with a "needs review" inbox for ambiguous fills

Review & charts

Cached 2m / 5m / 15m / 30m / daily candles
Entry/exit markers, initial & current stop lines
Anchored VWAP & moving averages
Setup, multi-tag behavior & lesson fields
Keyboard-driven "needs review" queue, with bulk status across the current filter
Chart downloads off until you switch them on; prices typed or pasted otherwise

Risk & reporting

R-multiple & expectancy everywhere
Day / week / month loss stops and new-risk caps, in RU, % or $
Time-weighted return that neutralizes deposits and withdrawals
A scratch band you set, so near-breakeven exits don't read as losses
CSV export on every report table
Backups to a folder you choose, so they outlive the app · repair that takes a snapshot before it touches anything · light and dark themes

What you're actually buying

One file on your disk, and nothing that can be switched off

CrucibleTrade is a desktop app backed by a single local SQLite database. There is no account to create, nothing to sync, and no server between you and your own trading record. Nothing about you or your trading ever leaves your machine.

One portable .db file you own, back up, and move anywhere, with backups written to a folder you pick so they outlive the app

No account, no cloud, no usage analytics, and no ads or upsells inside the app

Goes online for two things, price downloads you switch on and a daily update check, and you can turn both off. Every network path, in full

A license verified offline by signature, movable between your machines

macOS builds signed and notarized by Apple; every download listed with its SHA-256

Broker CSV

CrucibleTrade

Local .db

No cloud upload

Second product under the same contract as RangefinderInvest: local file, pay once, offline verification.

Pricing

Pay once. Keep it.

$99 launch price.

First 100 paid licenses · $149 regular.

Launch offer. The first 100 paid licenses are $99; the regular price is $149.

Includes 12 months of updates. The license never expires, and every version you have keeps working after the year is up. Another 12 months of new versions is an optional $59 update pass that never auto-renews.

30-day full trial, starting on your first edit or import. When it ends the app goes read-only; reports, exports and backups keep working. 30-day refunds.

Download free Buy for $99

Checkout by Stripe, the merchant of record. Full refund within 30 days; see the terms.

How it's different

A different kind of trading journal

Most journals are hosted subscriptions that pick your trading day up after the close and keep the record on someone else's servers. Here is the trade, in both directions.

	CrucibleTrade	Typical cloud journal
Where your trades live	On your machine in a local SQLite file	On the vendor's servers
Account & login	None	Required
Pricing	One-time purchase; 12 months of updates included, license never expires	Monthly / annual subscription
What happens when you stop paying	Nothing; you already paid. A lapsed update year takes nothing away	Access ends; your history sits behind the paywall
Works fully offline	✓ Yes	Needs a connection
Sizes the next trade before you take it	✓ Entry + stop → shares, against a per-account risk budget	Separate / limited
Trailed, break-even & split stops, with R anchored to initial risk	✓ Up to three lots; R never re-baselined	Rare / partial
Per-setup playbook + rule-adherence scoring	✓ Built in	Varies
Multi-tag mistake cost, with no double-counting	✓ Two-lens attribution	Rare
"Am I improving?" discipline trend over time	✓ Month-over-month	Varies
Per-account daily / weekly loss limits + risk throttle	✓ Sizes ideas down when you're pressing	Rare
Your data is portable and yours	✓ It's a file you own	Export on request
Broker coverage	CSV import, two families: Thinkorswim/Schwab and Fidelity	Often 100+ brokers
Automatic broker sync	✗ No; you import a CSV	✓ Common

Compared against the common model of hosted, subscription journals such as Tradervue, TraderSync, TradeZella, TradesViz and Edgewonk. Exact features vary by product and plan; check their current pages.

Longer reads: a trading journal without a subscription · a local-first TradeZella alternative · journaling thinkorswim trades

Questions

Frequently asked

What does it cost?

A one-time license, no subscription; the current launch offer and regular price are in the pricing section. It includes 12 months of updates, and the license itself never expires: every version you have keeps working, and another year of new versions is an optional update pass. The license is verified on your machine and can be moved between your computers. Checkout by Stripe; 30-day refunds per the terms.

What happens when the trial ends?

The app goes read-only. The 30-day clock starts on your first edit or import, not at install, so browsing the sample costs nothing. If it lapses before you buy, every trade and report stays readable, and CSV export and backups keep working. Importing, editing, planning and saving reviews resume when a license is activated.

Which brokers can I import from?

Two families: Thinkorswim / Schwab account-statement CSVs and Fidelity history CSVs, plus Fidelity ATP order files for precise execution times. That is the whole list today; there is no broker API sync. Imports are account-scoped, re-imports don't double-count, and matching preserves the setup, notes, and stops you already entered.

Is my data sent anywhere?

Your trading data? No. Everything lives in a local SQLite database on your computer; there is no account, no login, and no background sync. The app goes online for two things: market data you switch on (candles, quotes and ticker metadata from Yahoo Finance or, with your own key, Alpaca; a request carries a ticker and a date range, never a position), and a once-a-day update check carrying the app version and operating system, which you can turn off in Settings → Updates. The privacy policy lists both in full.

All eight questions →

Download CrucibleTrade

The full app, free for 30 days.

macOS

macOS 13 or later · Apple silicon · 176 MB

Download .dmg

Signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens with no Gatekeeper warning. Drag it to Applications and go. This build is Apple silicon only; there is no Intel build yet.

SHA-256 · .dmg3128ce89e3c81c897030bbd8fa164b03b2bbd4f05ba5f91fa03e7cb3d4e56a14

Windows

Windows 10 or 11 · 64-bit

Get it from theMicrosoft Store

Microsoft signs and delivers the Store build, so it installs with no security warning and keeps itself updated. On Windows this opens the Store app straight to the listing; press Get. If nothing opens, this PC hasn't got the Store (some Windows installs don't), so take the direct installer below instead.

Or download the installer directly (.exe, 154 MB)

The direct .exe triggers a security warning, sometimes two. Here's why, and what to do.

Windows SmartScreen and Chrome's equivalent flag installers they haven't seen downloaded many times yet. It's a measure of how well known a file is, not whether it's safe. Every new independent app starts at zero and earns its way out.

Depending on your browser and Windows settings you'll meet one of these, sometimes both:

Downloading: the browser says the file "isn't commonly downloaded". In Edge, the way through is hidden twice over: open the … menu beside the file in the downloads list and choose Keep, then, if a second box appears whose big button says Delete, click the ˅ on that button and choose Keep anyway. Deleting is the prominent option, not the correct one.
Opening it: if Windows shows "Windows protected your PC", click More info, then Run anyway. You may not see this one at all.

Either box may also list the publisher as Unknown; the SHA-256 below is how you check the file you got.

Prefer to skip it entirely? Use the Microsoft Store button above. Microsoft re-signs that build, so there's no warning at all. If you reach the Store listing in a browser instead, click its View in Store button rather than Download: the web page's Download button gives you a small Microsoft-made helper .exe, which is new enough to draw the same unrecognized-file warning. Either way you can confirm you got the exact file we published by checking the SHA-256 below.

SHA-256 · .exe33c3b2666e669fb234f76c4ab70e80f4f23069b12fc33d56fce1567ccbbbfedd

Linux

64-bit · Debian/Ubuntu · 172 MB

Download .deb

Unsigned, like most direct Linux downloads. Your software centre may say "not from a verified source". Installing from a terminal skips that: sudo apt install ./CrucibleTrade-0.79.1.deb

Other distributions (.AppImage, 217 MB)

SHA-256 · .deb3326f23d29afd25ccbd2783f02e3be9ca8e69fd439f31f575eb6537fce23f547SHA-256 · .AppImage7c21acd6157cef7930662d592abaead1909bc81735de2d50a778c7e1459768be

CrucibleTrade 0.79.1. Every file above is listed with its SHA-256, and the same digests are published as SHA256SUMS-0.79.1.txt. On macOS or Linux, shasum -a 256 <file> should print the matching line.

30-day full trial, then a one-time purchase including 12 months of updates (pricing). 30-day refunds.

No card, no account, nothing to cancel

One app for the whole trading day.