Guides
Practical guides for traders who want to improve.
How to keep a journal that changes your trading, backtest without fooling yourself, size positions, read your own statistics, survive a prop-firm challenge and stop revenge trading. Written by the people who build Sage, with numbers rather than slogans — and no strategy to sell you.
Journaling
Journaling
- 8 min readHow to choose a trading journal — a checklist, not a rankingThere is no best trading journal, only the one that answers the questions you will ask of it in six months. This is not a comparison of products — those go stale and are rarely written by anyone neutral. It is a checklist of the properties that decide whether a journal can improve your trading at all, with the reasoning behind each, so you can evaluate anything, including a spreadsheet, including Sage.Read the guide →
- 9 min readHow to keep a trading journal that actually changes your tradingMost trading journals fail for one reason: they record outcomes and nothing else. A spreadsheet of entries, exits and P&L tells you what happened, but it cannot tell you why, and it cannot show you what to do differently on the next trade. A journal that works records decisions — and then lets the numbers argue with your memory.Read the guide →
Backtesting
Backtesting
Risk management
Risk management
- 7 min readPosition sizing: size the trade from the risk, never the other way roundPosition sizing is the part of trading that is pure arithmetic and still gets skipped. The order is always the same: decide how much money you are willing to lose on this trade, find where the stop has to go for the idea to be wrong, and only then compute how many units make those two numbers agree. Do it in the other order — pick a size, then fit a stop to it — and the stop stops being a stop.Read the guide →
- 8 min readRisk/reward ratio and R-multiples, explainedRisk-to-reward is the most quoted and least understood number in trading. It is not a target to hit, a rule to obey, or a promise of profit — it is one half of an equation whose other half is your win rate. Understand the pair together, measure everything in R, and a great deal of trading advice becomes arithmetic you can check yourself.Read the guide →
Performance analysis
Performance analysis
- 10 min readTrading statistics that matter — and how each one lies aloneA trading record can be summarised in a dozen numbers, and every one of them is misleading on its own. Win rate ignores size. Total profit ignores risk. Profit factor ignores the sample. The skill is reading them together, with their uncertainty attached, and knowing which question each one actually answers.Read the guide →
- 10 min readHow to find your trading edge — in your own trades, not someone else'sAn edge is not a strategy you bought or a pattern you were told about. It is a measurable fact about your own trading: under some condition — a setup, a session, an hour, a tag — your results are better than your overall average, by more than luck would explain, over enough trades to believe it. Finding one is a matter of asking your journal the right questions in the right order, and being suspicious of the answers.Read the guide →
Prop firms
Prop firms
Psychology
Psychology
Reading is the cheap part. Recording is the edge.
Everything in these guides is measured automatically on your own trades in Sage — in R, with sample sizes, free.
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