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10.5. Your Rules Against Your Trades

A strategy written today says what you mean to do from here on. It is natural to wonder how your rules sit with what you did before you wrote them. Replay, from Chapter 5, answers that for one stock at a time.

Open Reflect → Replay, choose a stock, and choose one of your strategies after vs. Replay starts the strategy at your own first buys, and then lets its rules decide: when to add, and when to sell. The chart marks the strategy's trades with arrows beside the dots for yours, and a second card and list show the strategy's trades.

Figure 10-6 sets STYLAMIND, which we followed in Chapter 5, against Weekly trend with volume.

Reflect · Replay

STYLAMIND vs Weekly trend with volume

Actual (what you did)

DateTypePrice
18 Oct 2024BUY₹2,360.45
10 Jan 2025SELL₹2,137.7
1 Aug 2025BUY₹1,783.4
22 Aug 2025SELL₹1,632.6
10 Oct 2025BUY₹2,018
12 Dec 2025BUY₹2,227.6
8 May 2026BUY₹2,548
22 May 2026BUY₹2,758.6
5 Jun 2026BUY₹3,053.5
19 Jun 2026BUY₹3,327.8

Weekly trend with volume

DateTypePriceReason
18 Oct 2024BUY₹2,360.45T1
6 Jan 2025SELL₹2,137.7Price below the 21-week EMA
1 Aug 2025BUY₹1,783.4T1
4 Aug 2025SELL₹1,684.2Price below the 21-week EMA
10 Oct 2025BUY₹2,018T1
13 Apr 2026BUY₹2,243.6T2
4 May 2026BUY₹2,548T3
Figure 10-6: STYLAMIND: the investor's trades and the trades Weekly trend with volume would have made

Read side by side, the two lists differ mostly in timing:

  • In the first round, the rules sell on 6 January 2025, when the price fell below the 21-week EMA, four days before the investor sold.
  • In the second round, the rules sell on 4 August 2025 at ₹1,684.20, three days after the buy; the investor held on until 22 August and sold at ₹1,632.60.
  • In the third round, the rules add on 13 April and 4 May 2026, weeks when the price rose on heavy volume, where the investor added in December 2025 and through May and June 2026.

Replay sizes the strategy's buys by itself, so the amounts it shows are not yours. Read the comparison for its timing: where your rules would have acted, and where you did.

Where the two lists agree, your rules describe what you already do. Where they part, you have a question worth a note: was it the rule, or the moment?

Summary​

In this chapter, we wrote a method down. We:

  • met the primitives a rule can test: your own thresholds, position fields and indicators,
  • wrote rules, each a condition and an action with a reason,
  • gathered rules into strategies, applied them, and saw the actions they call for,
  • armed a guardrail that holds across every position,
  • and set a strategy's rules against the trades actually made.

A strategy can also be shared, and other members' strategies can be studied and adapted. In Chapter 11, we look at Community Ideas.