TraderVue Review – How Analyzing Your Trades Can Improve Your Performance

TraderVue Information

TraderVue is a combination online trading journal and social media platform designed to help you track your trading activity over time and share your trades with others on the network. The platform offers a surprising range of free features, including the ability to analyze how well individual trades and your overall trading strategy have been working. The social features of the platform are intended to help you share your activity with others on TraderVue as well as to pick up tips, as well as to publicize your trades to serve as an inhibition against making emotional trades.

How Much Does TraderVue Cost?

TraderVue offers three tiers of service, the most basic of which is free. Compared to most platforms marketed towards traders, TraderVue’s free version provides an impressive number of features, including the ability to log up to 100 trades per month and access to the platform’s social feed and basic analytics reports of your trading success.

The Silver plan costs $29 per month and allows you to log an unlimited number of trades as well as to log options, futures, and forex trades in addition to stock trades. The Silver plan also brings more advanced reporting that allows you to dig further into your trades to determine what types of strategies or setups are working better than others.

The Gold plan costs $49 per month and adds risk and exit analytics, as well as records of your commission costs, on top of the Silver plan features.

Features of TraderVue

Charts

One of the nicest features of TraderVue when looking back at the historical record of your trades is the ability to display charts with your entry and exit points marked right on the chart. Although these candlestick charts are limited in their customization, they are available in a wide variety of timescales and allow you to clearly see what patterns you were trading on for trades that are long in the past. Better yet, you can display two or more charts side-by-side on different timescales to get a clearer picture of your trade. The Silver and Gold plans also allow you to display running profit and loss charts for each stock that you have traded in the past.

Trade Journal

The trade journal is the heart of TraderVue – this is where the platform lists all of your entered trades in chronological order. The journal offers a number of options for filtering and sorting your data, including by stock symbol, date range, or tag. The journal view also lists whether you publicly shared each trade and any notes that you have made about the trade when you entered it. There is also a search box function that allows you to quickly search through your journal trades and notes for specific comments.

A nice feature is the ability to customize the template that your notes text boxes use within your account settings. Although you can only have one template that will be applied across all of your future notes, this can save a significant amount of repetitive typing when entering comments.

Entering new trades is more or less straightforward depending on how you normally record your trades. Confusingly, trades cannot be typed directly into TraderVue. Instead, they must be imported from a manually curated Excel spreadsheet or, more commonly, from a spreadsheet exported from your broker. While the platform provides detailed instructions for how to access and download the necessary spreadsheet for a huge number of brokerages, this can be more complicated than simply entering your trades manually if you use multiple brokerages. At the same time, TraderVue does allow you to enter notes and to tag a trade at the time you make it and will sync these notes when you later import trades from a spreadsheet. The import itself is painless and TraderVue syncs your account with the new information extremely quickly.

Analytics

The analytics built into the free version of TraderVue are useful but won’t offer strategy-changing insights for most traders. The basic view includes profit and loss overview charts that give an idea of whether your trading strategy is working on the whole. These charts can be toggled over multiple timescales to give more insight, but they do not provide more detail about the specific trades or setups that have been successful or failing. Additional detail charts breaking down your performance by day and timeframe are also available in the free version.

The value of the paid versions of TraderVue are in the advanced analytics that allow you to dig deeper into your performance and identify trends in which trades are profitable and which are losses. If you tag your trades by setup, strategy, or another analyzable trait, you can easily compare the performance of trades across tags. The platform also allows you to rapidly generate custom graphs from a selection of X and Y variables, such as the duration of a trade versus its profitability. Although interpretation of these graphs is up to you, for traders looking to improve these can be extremely helpful and significantly easier to use than rendering similar graphs by yourself in Excel.

Social Trading

The social aspect of TraderVue is relatively simple, with a bare-bones feed that shows you the most recently shared trades from across the platform. A nice feature is that each shared trade comes with a set of charts created by the user that allow you to clearly see their entry and exit points just as you would in your own trade journal. Shared trades can be quickly searched by usernames and stock symbols, although it is not possible to follow individual users as for most other social feeds.

Templates

TraderVue’s platform is relatively simple and does not allow you to save chart layouts across multiple equities or sessions. However, recreating charts is fast since there are few options and all are accessible from drop-down menus. You can save templates for your notes and comments under your account settings, although you can only have one template saved at a time. 

Connecting to Your Broker

TraderVue allows you to import trade data as CSV spreadsheets, which makes it independent from any brokerage. However, this also means that trades do not update automatically or in real-time. TraderVue’s import module offers detailed instructions for exporting the proper data spreadsheet for nearly all major brokerages and offers instructions for generating your own spreadsheet if you record trades manually.

How Does TraderVue Compare?

TraderVue is a solid online trading journal that offers easy metrics for tracking your profit and loss and evaluating your trading strategies. It is even used by successful traders like Nathan Michaud of Investors Underground.

The main advantage that TraderVue’s journal features boast over similar platforms is that the journal is entirely free and offers side-by-side charts that allow you to quickly check your historical entry and exit points. The free analytics are nice but not particularly useful for serious traders, although the reporting available under the Silver and Gold plans can be quite helpful for traders who are meticulous about tagging trades by setup or strategy and make comments about their thought process whenever entering trades. The social features are interesting but cannot stand up to the high social trading activity found on competing sites like Profit.ly.

What Type of Trader is TraderVue Best for?

TraderVue has value for both beginning and advanced traders. Beginning traders will benefit from the journal feature, which serves as a useful historical index of trades that can be looked back on as their trading abilities grow. Both beginning and advanced traders alike can benefit from the advanced analytics tools available under the Silver and Gold plans since these enable a critical look into the types of trades that are profiting versus those that are losing money.

Pros

• Free online trading journal
• Side-by-side multi-timescale charts clearly marking entry and exit points
• Advanced analytics tools under paid plans are very helpful for evaluating trading strategies
• Includes a social network for sharing trading strategies and setups
• Web-based platform is bare-bones and simple to use

Cons

• Does not link to brokerages, meaning that trades must be imported manually
• Charts and analytics measures are not fully customizable
• Social network is not very active compared to competitors