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Introduction

Welcome to The Tradestory Book, a guide to Tradestory. Tradestory is a web app for Indian retail investors who invest in shares and want to learn from their own trades. Tradestory builds a story of your investing from the tradebooks maintained by your broker. It builds a dashboard of your current and past positions. Each position is seen in the context of your portfolio. Each trade in that position is visible on the charts.

You then journal your trades. This allows you to write down your thinking when you placed your trade. A series of such notes becomes a strong learning ground of your approach towards building your positions in the market.

That is not all though. Tradestory provides you a framework to write your own rules and strategy, so that you can translate your learnings and theoretical understanding into a concrete execution plan. Once written and applied to positions, the plan gives you signals at the right times to execute your trades, whether buy, add, trim or sell. Tradestory holds no opinion on this. These are your own rules/learnings that drive these signals. You are in control of your portfolio as you write your own trade story.

Why Tradestory Exists​

Tradestory has come about to fill a gap for investors who want to do rule-based investing but have to build their own systems to manage their discipline. There are many important parts of disciplined investing.

  • Journaling: Any disciplined investor maintains a journal of trades that tells them how they have placed their trades over time. Often this is maintained in Excel sheets or some archaic software.
  • Rule-driven process: Disciplined investing requires one to trade by rules. Doing rule-based investing requires understanding of many concepts. This is followed by timely execution on a regular basis. To do this well, one needs clear visibility into their positions relative to their rules. This is often done on charting software, which is separate from the Excel sheets where users keep their records.
  • Reflections and Improvements: Markets don't stay the same. A disciplined investor's understanding also evolves as they learn over time. This requires the investor to both evolve their method of journaling and the rules to adapt to the new learnings.

While a disciplined investor attempts to do all three, corporate actions add their own dimensions. Bonus or split shares, mergers or demergers change how the calculations are done from time to time and thus require further flexibility in the Excel sheets.

Tradestory uses your broker's records of trades and maintains its own records of corporate actions so that you don't have to do these and you can focus on the more important work of journaling and building and executing a rule-driven process.

How This Works​

Every broker keeps a tradebook: a list of each buy and sell it carried out for you, with the date, the quantity and the price. It is the broker's own account of each trade. This is different from a Profit and Loss (PnL) statement or a Holding statement.

Tradestory starts from this tradebook. The broker has already written down every trade, so there is nothing to type in.

On top of this, Tradestory keeps track of all corporate actions and updates your trade positions to reflect those corporate actions so you do not have to do this on your own.

What remains is the part only you can do: looking at what happened, and noting why. That leaves two important things. First, your journal notes. Tradestory gives you a way to journal your trades so you can learn from them over time. Second, a rule-driven system. Tradestory gives you a very rich interface for defining technical rules to trade. You then define how you want to trade, and Tradestory shows you what your own rules say for each position.

Who This Book Is For​

This book is for anyone who uses Tradestory or is thinking about it. We assume you have a demat account with at least one broker in India, and that you have bought and sold some shares.

We assume nothing about how you invest. Some people buy a stock once and hold it. Some build a position in several steps. Some do a little of both. Tradestory shows each of these as it is, and this book describes what you will see in each case.

You will not need any special vocabulary. When a term comes up for the first time, we explain it, and Appendix A collects every term in one place.

What This Book Covers​

This book describes Tradestory: what each screen shows, where its numbers come from, and how to use it. Decisions about your money stay with you. Tradestory is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser, and nothing in this book is advice to buy, hold or sell anything.

How to Use This Book​

The book is meant to be read in order, from front to back. Each chapter builds on the ones before it. The chapters are grouped into five parts, in the order most people come to use Tradestory:

  • Part I, Your trades, gets your trades into Tradestory (Chapters 1 to 3).
  • Part II, Observe, shows your positions and your trades on a chart (Chapters 4 and 5).
  • Part III, Reflect, covers your numbers, your journal, the stop-loss decisions you record, and looking back on a position (Chapters 6 to 9).
  • Part IV, Improve, covers writing down your own rules in the Playbook, and the ideas other members have shared (Chapters 10 and 11).
  • Part V, Your account, covers settings and exporting your data (Chapter 12).

Chapter 2 is a short walk through the whole of Tradestory, touching each part lightly. The chapters after it return to each part in detail.

Every chapter ends with a short summary of what it covered, so you can check what you have learned before moving on.

The pictures in this book are numbered by chapter, such as Figure 1-1. They show Tradestory's screens as they look with our example loaded.

The Example We Follow​

Throughout the book we use one example: a demo tradebook from Zerodha, prepared for this purpose. It holds 650 trades made between October 2024 and September 2026, of which 443 are buys and 207 are sells. Once loaded, it gives 24 positions that are still open and 207 that have been closed. Each trade uses a real company and that day's real market price. The quantities are made up.

You can download the example and load it into Tradestory yourself, to follow along on your own screen: tradebookDEMO1234EQ.csv. Loading it into a portfolio of its own keeps it apart from your own trades, as we see in section 3.2. Our example portfolio has a capital of ₹50 lakh, set as in section 4.1; set the same, and your screens will match the figures.

We treat this tradebook as a record to look at. Some of its positions were built in several steps, and some of its closed positions ended in a gain and some in a loss. We describe what the record shows, and we leave the judging of it to you.

Let's Begin​

In Chapter 1, we create an account, export a tradebook from a broker, and load it into Tradestory.