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The quick-log row sits pinned at the top of the Trade Log page. It is designed for speed: enter the minimum required information, press Enter, and the trade is saved immediately. You can always open the trade afterward to add grades, tags, notes, or screenshots. Nothing about the logging flow requires you to leave the keyboard.

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Required fields

The only fields you must fill in to save a trade are symbol, direction, entry price, and exit price. Everything else is optional.

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Logging a trade

1

Enter the symbol

Type the ticker or instrument in the first field (e.g., AAPL, NQ, TSLA, EURUSD). NextTick accepts equities, futures, forex, and crypto symbols.
2

Select direction

Choose Long or Short from the direction toggle. Long means you bought to open; short means you sold to open.
3

Enter your entry price

Type the price at which your position was opened. Use the exact fill price, not a rounded estimate.
4

Enter your exit price

Type the price at which the position was closed. NextTick calculates P&L and R-multiple automatically once both prices and position size are known.
5

Add optional detail

Expand the optional fields to record any of the following before saving:
  • Position size — number of shares, contracts, or units
  • Stop loss — your planned stop price (used to compute risk_amount and r_multiple)
  • Timeframe — the chart timeframe you traded on: 1min, 5min, 15min, 1hr, 4hr, or daily
  • Setup tag — a label for the trade type (see below)
  • Grade — your self-assessed execution quality (see below)
  • Notes — any free-form observations about the trade
  • Emotional tags — psychological state tags (see below)
6

Press Enter

Press Enter (or click the save button) to write the trade to your log. It appears immediately in the table below.

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Grade system

Grading is a self-assessment of how well you executed the trade — not whether it was profitable. A losing trade can earn an A+ if you followed your rules precisely. A winning trade can earn an F if you sized up recklessly or held past your plan. Grades feed directly into the Analytics dashboard. Filtering by grade lets you compare your A+ and A trades against your C and below trades to see whether better execution correlates with better outcomes in your specific setups.

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Setup tags

The setup_tag field is a free-text label you assign to categorize the type of trade you took. Common examples include ORB (opening range breakout), VWAP reclaim, breakout, pullback, reversal, gap fill, and earnings fade. You define the tags; NextTick does not enforce a fixed vocabulary.
Use consistent, exact setup tag names every time. If you sometimes type ORB and sometimes orb open range, Analytics will treat them as two separate setups. Settling on a short, consistent vocabulary early means your performance data by setup type will be accurate from day one.

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Emotional tags

The emotional_tags field accepts one or more free-text labels that describe your psychological state when you took the trade. Examples include focused, calm, rushed, revenge, fear of missing out, overconfident, and distracted. Over time, these tags help you identify whether your worst trades cluster around specific emotional states — a pattern that is invisible without the data.