A number tells part of a trade. But rarely the whole story.
+$250. -$125. 4 ticks. 12 ticks. A result. An entry time. An exit time.
All of this information is useful. But when I come back to a trade several weeks later, it doesn't necessarily tell me what I was seeing at the moment I made the decision.
And that's where the screenshots became much more important in LowFlow.
I didn't just want to know a trade had existed
I wanted to be able to review it. The context. The chart. The level. The entry. The exit. What was happening around it.
Because over time, our memory rebuilds a lot of things. In the moment, an entry can seem perfectly logical. Three weeks later, we can remember a slightly different version of what we were actually seeing.
A screenshot, on the other hand, doesn't rewrite the story.
So I started automating the images
On some platforms, the add-on can automatically capture the chart at the moment of entry and exit. The trader doesn't need to think: "I have to take a screenshot now." The trade happens. The image is created. And LowFlow can then attach it to the matching trade.
The idea is not to pile up thousands of photos for nothing. The idea is to keep the context.
Then replay became the logical next step
A screenshot shows a precise moment. But sometimes, I want to go further. I want to review what happened before. How the market reached the level. What happened after.
So I started integrating the historical data used to rebuild the chart. At that point, the journal stops being just a list of finished trades. It also becomes a place to come back and study a past day.
Context can also come from elsewhere
A plan prepared before the session. Levels. Economic news. A note. An annotated screenshot. A comment added after the trade.
Taken separately, these are small pieces of information. But when they are gathered around a trading day, they begin to tell a much more complete story.
This is what I wanted from the start
Without really having the words to define it. I didn't just want to build a database of results. I wanted to be able to open a day six months later and understand what had happened.
See my trades. See my images. See the context. See what I had written. And possibly replay part of the market.
Not to change the past. To be able to actually study it.
Statistics answer one question, context answers another
Statistics are important. But they mostly answer the question: what happened?
Context and screenshots let you reach for another question: what was I seeing when it happened?
And that difference is huge.
Because with enough recorded days, LowFlow no longer keeps only results. It keeps a trace of how the trader was working at that moment.
That's when I understood what I was really building. A trading memory.