Logging trades manually
The New Trade form field by field, editing after the fact, and logging by chat.
The New Trade form logs a single execution with everything Afterburner needs to compute analytics. Press n anywhere on the dashboard (or click New Trade, or the floating + button) to open it.
The fields, one by one
| Field | How it works |
|---|---|
| Pair | Autocomplete over 40+ instruments. It understands aliases: type "gold" to get XAU/USD, "nasdaq" for US100, "dow" for US30, "brent" for UKOIL, and so on. |
| Direction | Two buttons, Long and Short. Nothing is pre-selected: pick one. |
| Result (R) | Free text that accepts decimals, commas and negatives, flanked by − and + steppers that nudge by 0.5R. This is your outcome in R-multiples; left empty, it saves as 0R. |
| Entry / Exit time | Full date-and-time pickers, both required. The exit calendar marks your entry day, and an exit before the entry is refused. |
| Timezone | A curated list of common trading timezones with your detected zone pinned at the top and flagged YOUR TIMEZONE. Times you type are interpreted in this zone, so a journal built while traveling stays coherent. |
| Session | Derived automatically from the entry time (Asia, London, New York, Overlap, Off Hours). You never set it by hand. |
| Timeframe | Required: the chart timeframe the trade was taken on (1m, 2m, 3m, 5m, 15m, 30m, 1H, 4H or 1D). It opens the chart on that timeframe and feeds the by-timeframe analytics. |
| Folder | Optional. File the trade under any of your folders (Backtest, Live, or your own). A trade can live in several folders at once. |
| Tags | Optional, shown once you have tag categories: one box per category, exactly like on the trade page. You can pick, create, rename or recolor tags here; new categories are created on a trade page. |
| Status | Taken (the default) or Skipped. A skipped trade logs a setup you saw but passed on: it is hidden under the default Only Taken view and shows under Only Skipped. |
| Notes | Free text up to 2,000 characters. Searchable later through the notes filter. |
Save trade adds it to the journal. Price levels (entry, take profit, stop loss) are set afterwards on the trade page, by clicking them on the chart.
Reuse last
Logging a session of similar trades? The Reuse last button prefills the form from your most recent trade: same pair, timeframe and timezone, with the calendars already opened on that trade's month. You only pick the day, time and result.
Editing after the fact
Every trade's entry and exit day and time can be changed inline on its trade page (or in its chart dialog), and the chart re-centers immediately. A click on the TAKEN or SKIPPED status flips it, and notes are click-to-edit, on any trade. Manual trades (and AI-imported ones) go further: click the direction pill to flip Long and Short, click the result pill to type a new R, and pick another timeframe in the info bar. Trades imported from a native Rafale file keep those frozen, because they are an exact record of a backtest; you can still delete them, tag them, move them between folders and write notes.
Two other ways to log
- Tell the AI. "Log a long on gold, 5m, in at 14:32, out at 15:10, +2.4R": the AI analyst pre-fills a New Trade card for you to check and save. See Changes to your journal.
- From Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini. Once Afterburner is connected to your AI app, log trades by chat from your phone; it asks you for each missing field. See In Claude, ChatGPT & Gemini.
Manual entries are first-class
A hand-logged trade feeds the exact same metrics, charts and filters as an imported one. Mixing live journaling with imported backtests in one account is the intended workflow; folders keep them separable. Your hand-logged trades are grouped in the File filter as Manually imported trades.