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Trade grades A to D: how a trade is scored

Updated September 6, 2026

Every closed trade can be graded A, B, C or D, with a note explaining the letter. A is excellent execution and D is poor. The grade is about how you traded, which is why it does not always agree with whether you made money.

What the grader is given

Your trade, as your broker reported it: instrument, direction, entry and exit, size, times, session, account and net result.

Your journal note on that trade and your own assessment of it, if you wrote them.

Your active rules. If you have not written any rules yet, the grader is told exactly that and grades without them.

That is the whole input. It has no stop distance, no chart and no market data, so what it can judge is your execution and your rules, not whether a level was correct.

What comes back

  • The grade, A to D.
  • The setup it identified.
  • A short coaching note, two or three sentences.
  • Whether you followed your plan.
  • The rules you broke on that trade, listed by name.
  • A category for the mistake, where there was one.

The drawer for that trade shows the grade badge, the setup, the coaching note and the rule violations. Where the run raised an alert, that appears underneath with its severity and a specific action for next time.

Correct trades are graded too, not just bad ones. A product that only speaks up when you have made a mistake teaches you that nothing else is worth noticing, and an A is a record worth having.

Why a winning trade can be graded D

Because the grade sits beside the rules you broke and whether you followed your plan, and money made is not evidence that either went well.

A trade taken outside your setup, at three times your normal size, as your sixth of the day when your rule says five, is a bad trade that happened to pay. Grading it well would teach you to do it again, and the next one is the one that ends the account.

The reverse is also true. A correct trade taken at a loss is still a correct trade, and it grades accordingly. That is the whole idea: the process is the thing you control, so the process is the thing worth scoring.

When it runs

Automatically, on newly closed trades, after every path that brings trades in: the hourly sync, a CSV import, connecting an account, and live fills as they land. Most of the time you read a grade rather than ask for one.

Grading runs a few decisions at a time rather than all at once, so a large import is graded over several passes instead of in one burst. A trade already graded is not graded again.

Grades produced by the scheduled background pass do not count against your AI allowance.

Requirements

A closed trade. That is all.

A stop is not required, notes are not required, and rules are not required, though a grade against no rules is a weaker grade: the more of your process is written down, the more of it there is to judge.

What a grade is not

It is a second opinion on your execution, not a verdict and not advice. If you disagree with one, the useful move is to write in the trade's note why, because that note is read the next time you or the coach look at the trade.

The grades that matter are the pattern, not the individual letter. Five Ds in a week is the signal. One D is a Tuesday.

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