What Playbooks do
A Playbook is your trading plan. As you trade, TradeDNA checks each trade against the supported automatic rules in the plan and shows you where you stand. Entry guidance and Exit guidance stay visible on the plan for reflection, but they are not automatically graded. We surface and flag, we never block a trade, and you always have the final call. The Browse tab holds ready-made plans, and My Plays holds the ones you have adopted.
Build a custom plan
On the Browse tab, choose Create custom plan. You can set:
Entry guidance and Exit guidance: visible notes for how you want to enter and exit, not automatic compliance rules.
Pre-trade checklist: shown for your own confirmation before saving a trade.
Risk limits: max risk per trade, max daily loss, and max trades per day.
Require a stop-loss on every trade: an optional toggle under the risk limits. Turn it on and we flag any trade that closes with no stop recorded, so undefined-risk trades stand out. The trade still saves, and the flag is there to learn from.
Allowed sessions and Allowed symbols.
Give it a name, mark it Active to drive your dashboard and automatic-rule grading, and choose Create plan. Custom plans are available on every plan.
You can also ask Helix to draft a plan for you or tighten the one you are on. See Helix drafts a new playbook and Helix improves your playbook.
How rules show up
When a trade falls outside a supported automatic rule, TradeDNA notes it on the trade and in your compliance view, for example when your daily loss limit was already reached. The note is there to learn from, and the trade still saves either way. Entry guidance and Exit guidance remain visible on the plan and never create an automatic compliance row or change a compliance percentage.
How your risk is measured
Automatic grading covers the supported numeric and discipline rules below.
Max risk per trade. A risk percent you enter on a trade yourself always wins. When there is none, we work it out from your stop distance and your account balance at the time you opened the trade. If the math produces a number that cannot be right, more than your whole account on one trade, we leave that trade ungraded rather than grade it against a bad number.
Losses without a stop. A losing trade with no stop recorded is graded by the loss itself. If the realized loss was larger than your per-trade cap, you'll see it noted.
Max daily loss. When the day's realized losses cross your cap, we flag the trade that crossed the line. The day follows your local trading day.
Max trades per day. Adopted plays count too. If the play you adopted caps trades per day, the trade over the cap gets flagged, same as on a custom plan.
Required stop, trading days, sessions, and symbols. When enabled, these rules check the recorded stop and the trade's day, session, or instrument.
Adopted-play discipline rules. Stop-after-loss, stop-after-win, revenge-trading, stop-widening, and early-partial settings are checked when the required trade evidence is available.
Only trades taken under the plan. Trades from before a plan existed are never graded against it, so importing a year of old history stays clean. Grading starts when the plan does.
Arbitrary sentences in Entry guidance or Exit guidance are not interpreted as automatic rules. If you want a measurable limit to affect compliance, add it as a supported automatic rule.
Track a prop-firm challenge
On the Quant plan, you can track a prop-firm challenge against its real rule set. On the My Plays tab, add a challenge, then walk the short wizard:
Choose to Connect & track a broker account or Track manually.
Pick your firm, challenge type, and account size.
Set up your phases, add an optional nickname and evaluation fee, then confirm.
If you chose Connect & track, check the Starting balance field. We prefill it with the balance your account is at now, including trades already on it, so grading starts from the right number. Edit it if your firm's dashboard shows something different.
From there, TradeDNA tracks your progress and warns you as you approach a limit, before the firm calls it.
How challenge grading works
Every firm grades differently, so the tracker follows your firm's own rulebook:
The firm's real consequence. Not every breach ends an account. At some firms a daily-loss breach locks the trading day, and a consistency miss holds the payout, while at others the same breach fails the account. When your firm's answer is a lock rather than a fail, the challenge shows an amber AT LIMIT status instead of a red one, so a rough day reads as what it is.
The firm's drawdown, the firm's day. Drawdown is tracked the way your firm tracks it, static, trailing end-of-day, or trailing intraday, and daily figures follow the firm's trading-day boundary rather than a generic calendar day.
Honest numbers. We grade from your closed trades. Your firm also counts open positions and intraday moves we cannot see, so the challenge page says so: treat the figures as an estimate and confirm in the firm's dashboard before any payout decision.
Unpriced trades are called out. If some trades on the account could not be priced, the challenge card notes how many were excluded from grading, so a real loss is never silently missing from the picture.
Payouts stay drawdown-neutral. Record a withdrawal with Log payout on the challenge page and your graded balance adjusts, without the withdrawal reading as a drawdown hit.
