2.5. Where the Playbook Comes In

Everything we have seen so far looks back at trades already made. The Playbook is where you write down how you intend to manage positions from here on.

Many investors have a method: conditions under which they add to a position, take some profit, or sell. The Playbook, in the Plan group of the menu, is where such a method is written down as rules. Rules are built from primitives, the measures a rule can test, such as a position's gain or a price indicator. Rules come together in strategies, and a strategy can be applied to your positions.

Once a strategy applies to a position, the Dashboard's Action column shows what your own rules call for on that position today. Tradestory forms no view on any stock. The action comes entirely from the rules you wrote.

Our example has no rules yet, so its Action column is empty. We return to the Playbook in Chapter 10, once the rest of Tradestory is familiar.

Summary

That was our first walk through Tradestory. Using the example tradebook, we:

• read the Dashboard, one row per open position,
• opened KTKBANK to see its five tranches, then saw the same trades on a weekly price chart,
• found the Journal's queue of trades waiting for a note,
• looked at the equity curve and the results of the closed positions,
• and saw where the Playbook fits in.

Every stop on this walk has its own chapter. We begin at the start of the path, with getting all your trades into Tradestory and keeping them current, in Chapter 3.