Every closed trade has two numbers that your entry and exit alone can't tell you: how far it ran in your favour while you held it, and how far it went against you before it worked. Those are MFE (maximum favourable excursion) and MAE (maximum adverse excursion). Ledger of Alpha measures them from historical price bars covering exactly the window you were in the trade.
Where to find them
- Per trade — the Excursion card in the Journal review pane, and on the trade detail screen on your phone.
- In the table — three opt-in columns on the Trades page: MFE R, MAE R and Exit eff. Turn them on with the gear icon at the top-right of the table.
- Across trades — Analytics → Behavior for exit quality, and Analytics → Risk for where your trades actually went against you.
Reading the card
The rail runs from your worst adverse point on the left, through your entry, to your best favourable point on the right — in that order for long and short trades alike, so the left side is always the bad side. The bead is where you actually exited.
- Ran in favour — MFE. Shown in R (multiples of your initial risk, i.e. the distance from entry to stop), plus percent and dollars.
- Went against — MAE, in the same units.
- Exit eff. — the share of the favourable move you actually captured. A trade that ran 3R and that you closed at 2R has an exit efficiency of 67%, and 1R was "left on the table".
R figures need a stop on the trade. Without one there is no unit of risk to divide by, so the card falls back to showing percent as the headline figure and tells you why. Dollars are shown either way. This is common on imported journals — most broker exports carry no stop — and it is the single change that unlocks the most from these numbers:log a stop and every excursion becomes comparable across your whole journal.
The same applies to the across-trades charts: the scatter and the adverse-excursion distribution are both drawn in R, so they only include trades that have a stop recorded.
Why some trades say "approximate"
The figures are only as fine as the price bars behind them, so the card always shows which resolution it used and flags a measurement it can't fully stand behind. There are exactly two reasons:
- No entry or exit time was logged. Without times we have to widen the window to whole days, so the high and low cover every day the trade spanned instead of just the hours you were in it — which overstates both figures. This one you can fix: add entry and exit times to the trade and re-measure.
- Only coarse bars were available. Intraday history doesn't go back forever (see below), so an older trade may only be measurable on daily bars — and a daily bar's range covers the whole session, not your hold. Both MFE and MAE will read high.
- It was measured on the continuous futures contract. Our market-data source delists an individual futures contract once it expires — so a trade on, say, the June micro S&P contract stops being fetchable the moment the market rolls to September. Rather than leave those trades blank forever, we measure them on the continuous front-month series instead. It tracks the same market, but prices step at each roll, so the figures are indicative of that contract rather than a record of it. The card says so explicitly whenever this happens.
Why some trades show nothing at all
- Options trades never get an excursion. This is a data limit, not an oversight: our market-data source publishes no historical option premium bars, so there is nothing to measure the contract's high and low against. A stock or futures trade has a continuous price history; an option contract does not. Measuring the underlying instead is a different statistic, and we'd rather show nothing than quietly show you that.
- Open trades. An excursion is measured over a finished window, so a trade needs an exit before it can be measured.
- "Not measured yet" / "Queued". Captures run on a schedule. Press Measure on the card to do it immediately.
- "Price history unavailable". The intraday window has aged out (see below) and can't be recovered. We show the reason rather than zeros, because a 0.00R reading would look like a measured result.
How far back it works
Our free market-data source keeps intraday history for a limited time — roughly a month of minute bars and about two months of 5-minute bars, while daily bars go back indefinitely. The app automatically picks the finest resolution that can still cover your trade, so recent trades are measured precisely and older ones fall back to coarser bars and get flagged as approximate.
The practical consequence: a trade's intraday excursion is worth capturing sooner rather than later. Once the fine bars are gone they are gone, which is why closed trades are queued automatically as soon as you save them.
What the across-trades views show
- What was there vs what you took — one dot per trade: peak favourable move on one axis, the move you booked on the other. The dashed diagonal is a perfect exit; distance below it is what was available and not booked.
- Exit efficiency — the distribution of how much of each move you captured, with your median called out.
- How far each trade went against you — adverse excursion for winners and for losers, side by side on the same scale. This is where you can see whether your winners ever needed the full risk you gave them.
Every one of those charts states how many trades it covers and how many are not measured. A distribution over a handful of trades describes those trades, not your trading.
Plans
The per-trade card and the table columns are available on Essential and Pro. The across-trades analytics are Pro. See Plans and what each one includes.
Related: Metrics glossary · Trade entry fields · The Reports page.