Trade sequence & emotional state

What the Sequence card measures — trades taken after a loss, inside a losing streak, or past your daily loss limit — and how emotions are grouped.

Every other chart in Analytics → Behavior groups your trades by something about them — the symbol, the setup, the weekday, the session. The Trade sequence card is the only one that reads the order they happened in: what you did straight after a loss, what happened deeper into a losing streak, and what you did on a day your own loss limit had already gone.

None of it is new data. It is worked out entirely from what your trades already record, and it describes what happened — it is not a prediction, a score, or advice.

Entered after closing a loss

Each closed trade is measured against the most recent loss that had already closed when you entered it, and dropped into a band: within 15 minutes, 15–60 minutes, 1–4 hours, 4–24 hours, or over 24 hours. The bottom row of the table is all of your sequenced trades, so you can see whether a band really stands apart from your own average rather than from an outside standard.

  • Median size is that band's position size as a multiple of your own rolling median over the previous 20 trades. It is notional exposure — price × quantity × contract multiplier — not risk, because most journals don't record a stop on every trade and a risk-based median would quietly be computed from a much smaller, self-selected set of trades.
  • A trade you entered while the previous loss was still open follows nothing, so it is left out of the bands and counted in the note under the card.

By losing streak

How many losses in a row came immediately before each trade, with the median time between entries at each depth — that gap is what shows whether your trading speeds up inside a streak. A breakeven trade neither extends nor resets a streak: it is not a loss to react to, and treating it as a reset would erase real streaks on a book that scratches a lot of trades.

Off-plan trades

A trade counts as off-plan when it carries no strategy, no checklist and no tag — nothing recording that it was planned. The card compares how often that happens within 15 minutes of a loss against every other time.

After your daily loss limit

If you've set a daily loss limit on the account, this block reports what happened after it was reached: how many days it was reached, how many of those days you kept trading, and how those trades did compared with the ones you took earlier the same day. This is the only threshold on the card, and it is yours — nothing here compares you against a number we invented. In the "All accounts" view each trade is measured against its own account's limit.

The block is deliberately cautious: a day's running total counts only trades that closed that day and record an exit time, because a trade with no exit clock can't be placed before or after anything. Missing a breach is a missing row; claiming one that didn't happen would be telling you that you broke a rule you didn't.

A trade needs an entry date and time

Sequence can't be read without one, so trades with no entry time are left out and counted in the note under the card — the same rule the session chart follows. This is most visible on imported and auto-synced books, where the export often carries a date but no time. Add entry times to the trades you care about and they join immediately; nothing needs recalculating.

By emotion

The By emotion table on the same segment groups your closed trades by the state you logged on them — win rate, net P&L and average per state, exactly like the tag and mistake tables beside it. Before this release the field was collected and read by nothing at all.

  • Free text is grouped onto a small vocabulary. Fear, Greed, FOMO, Anxiety, Regret, Frustration, Revenge, Bored, Calm, Confident. Common variants map onto it automatically — "tilted" and "angry" group with Frustration, "nervous" with Anxiety — and older trades logged as Fomo group with today's FOMO.
  • Nothing is thrown away. Anything outside the vocabulary is shown in an Other row rather than dropped, and it stays on the trade untouched. Other is deliberately excluded from dashboard insights — it is a mixed bag, not a finding.
  • A trade logged with two states counts once in each, the same rule as tags. Trades with nothing logged are not counted anywhere.

Reading any of this honestly

  • Check the sample first. The note under the card says exactly how many of your closed trades it could read, and why the rest were left out.
  • One cut is rarely the whole story. If you only trade one setup in the morning, a "just after a loss" result may really be a setup result. Cross-check in Performance.
  • It describes what happened, not what will. These are your own past records summarised.

Ask the support assistant

Answers come from the Help Center articles on this site — it can explain how the app works, not how to trade.

Answers are generated from Help Center articles and can be incomplete. contact us

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Trade sequence & emotional state — Ledger of Alpha Help