Strategy Lab & playbooks

A playbook is a setup you trade on purpose, with its rules written down: the conditions you need before an entry, how you size it, where the stop goes. You give a trade its playbook in the Review card, or mark it Skip with a reason when it belonged to none; the reviews guide walks through that card.

Free holds 3 playbooks; Pro and Ultimate hold unlimited. Archiving a playbook keeps its history and takes it out of the ranking until you restore it.

Strategy Lab in the top bar ranks your playbooks by what they contributed: each one's closed round trips, win rate, average R, total P&L and profit factor, all derived from the same matched round trips the rest of the app uses. A round trip belongs to the playbook on its opening lot, because a setup is chosen when the position is opened.

• Round trips carrying no playbook on either leg sit outside every row. The ledger shows how many on its unallocated line, so a confident-looking table never hides how much of the book it describes.
• Profit factor is gross wins divided by gross losses. A playbook with no losing trip shows no ratio; a playbook with no winning trip shows zero. Neither is a placeholder.
• Filter the ledger by status, and expand a row for the reasoning behind its verdict.

Every playbook carries one call, read from its own numbers in a fixed order. It is a rule ladder, not a score, and the first rule that applies wins.

• Archived: out of the ranking until you restore it.
• Unmeasured: no closed round trip carries this playbook yet, so there is nothing to measure. Absence is not zero.
• Not enough: fewer than 30 closed round trips. The measures are real and shown; the ruling waits, and the row says how many trips to go.
• Retire: past the threshold with a profit factor below 1. It returns less than it loses: cut a new version of the rules, or archive it.
• Marginal: positive, but a profit factor under 1.25 is thin enough for commission or slippage to eat.
• Working: a profit factor from 1.25 up to 1.75. Keep trading it, and look for the rule costing you the most.
• Compounding: a profit factor of 1.75 or more, or no losing trip at all. The candidate for more size.

When you change a playbook's rules, cut a new version rather than editing history. Each version keeps its own record: the round trips whose opening lot was taken under it, with their win rate and profit factor. That is what makes versioning worth doing: "version one ran eighty trips at 1.10, version two has run fifty at 1.90" is a reason to keep the change.

Sage reads your active playbooks on every answer. Ask it to audit playbook compliance and it scores recent trades against the rules you wrote, with the trades that prove each drift. It coaches on the rules you chose; it never writes a setup for you or tells you what to trade. More about Sage.