Goals, Trading Rules, and Discipline Tracking
Trading rules in the CleaRank Trade Journal are scored automatically against every trade, including simulator trades that mirror into your journal. You write your rules in the Plans & Rules tab, and the journal reports a Discipline score and a weekly trend from how often you followed them. This guide explains how rules are written and how they are scored. Goals live in the same tab but are never scored; they have their own guide, Setting and Tracking Goals.
Defining goals and rules
Open your journal and go to the Plans & Rules tab. There you set goals and write trading rules, the guardrails you have decided to trade inside. Typical rules look like:
- Trade only inside a session window, for example “only trade between 9:30 and 11:30”.
- Stop after consecutive losses, for example “no trading after 2 losses in a day”.
- Process rules, like trading only your defined playbooks.
Auto-tracked rules
Rules that can be judged from your trade history are tracked automatically, with no manual box-ticking. The journal marks a rule as auto-tracked when it recognizes the behavior behind it, and it can watch for:
- A daily trade cap, for example a maximum of 3 trades in one day.
- A missing stop loss, so a trade taken without one is flagged.
- A maximum loss or risk percentage per trade.
- Session windows, such as no trading before or after a given time (evaluated in your own timezone).
- Stopping after a set number of consecutive losses.
Rules written in other shapes are still recorded and still worth keeping, they are simply not scored automatically. For a fast start, the one-click starter set adds four rules that are all tracked automatically: always use a stop loss, max 3 trades per day, max loss 2 percent per trade, and no trading after 2 losses in a row.
Write rules in measurable terms. “Do not overtrade” cannot be checked automatically; “no trading after 2 losses in a day” can. Times, counts, and session windows make a rule trackable.
The discipline system
Discipline score
Your Discipline score is the percentage of your closed trades that broke none of your rules: clean closed trades divided by all closed trades, times 100. It appears among the Performance at a Glance cards on the Trade Journal Dashboard tab, next to your P&L, because following your own rules is a performance metric in its own right.
The score is all-time by default, and it spans every journal you keep, because your rules belong to your account rather than to a single journal. Your simulator trades are scored against your rules too: editing or deleting a rule re-scores your simulator history against the new rule set, while trades you enter by hand are checked when you save them.
Two situations leave you with no score at all. If you have not defined any rules, or you have no closed trades yet, the tile shows a dash and a prompt to set your rules. An empty rule set does not score 100 percent. One closed trade is enough to produce a number, so treat the score as noisy early on: a single trade reads either 0 percent or 100 percent.
The only banding is the color on the tile: 80 percent and above is green, 60 to 79 is amber, and below 60 is red. CleaRank treats 80 percent as the informal target, and sitting below it usually means you are over-trading or letting your size creep up. The fix is rarely to delete the rule you keep breaking: trade less often, and smaller, until the rule stops costing you the score.
Tiltmeter
The Tiltmeter is not a second gauge. It is the Discipline score itself, so it rises as your behavior improves and falls as rule breaks pile up. There is no inverted tilt scale and no named zones to decode, so if you want an early warning after a red morning, watch the Discipline score and its trend rather than looking for a separate reading.
Weekly trend
The trend arrow beside the score compares the last two weeks that actually contained trades. Weeks in which you did not trade are skipped, so “versus last week” can mean versus your last week with trades. There is no dead band: a one point difference already flips the arrow, and “steady” means the two weeks came out exactly equal. Until two such weeks exist, the trend is hidden. A falling trend next to a rising P&L is a warning worth taking seriously: profits earned while breaking rules tend not to last.
Rule-compliance cards
Each rule gets its own compliance card showing how often you honor it. That granularity matters, because a single overall percentage is vague but “you break the two-loss rule more than any other” tells you exactly what to fix.
Getting started
- Open Plans & Rules. In your journal, go to the Plans & Rules tab.
- Add two or three rules. Start with a session window and a stop-after-losses rule, or take the four starter rules. Keep them measurable.
- Trade normally. Your trades, including the simulator trades that mirror into the journal, are scored against the rules automatically.
- Review weekly. Check your Discipline score, its weekly trend, and the per-rule cards, then adjust the rules that are not serving you.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a clean trade?
A closed trade that broke none of your rules. The Discipline score is your clean closed trades divided by all your closed trades, times 100, so every rule you add makes the score stricter and more meaningful.
Is the Tiltmeter a separate gauge?
No. The Tiltmeter is the Discipline score itself, not a second reading, and it rises as your behavior improves. There is no inverted scale and no named zones. The only banding is the color on the tile: 80 percent and above is green, 60 to 79 is amber, and below 60 is red.
Do my simulator trades count toward discipline?
Yes. Your simulator trades are scored against your rules like any other trade, so you can build the discipline habit on a virtual practice balance first. Editing or deleting a rule re-scores your simulator history, while trades you enter by hand are checked when you save them.
Why does my Discipline tile show a dash instead of a number?
Because you have no rules defined yet, no closed trades yet, or both. The tile shows a dash and a prompt to set your rules until both exist, since an empty rule set would otherwise score a meaningless 100 percent. Note that the score is all-time and spans every journal you keep, because your rules belong to your account rather than to a single journal.
Why is my rule not being tracked automatically?
Automatic tracking covers behavior that can be read from your trades: a daily trade cap, a missing stop loss, a maximum loss or risk percentage per trade, session windows before or after a given time, and stopping after a set number of consecutive losses. Rules written in other shapes are still recorded, they are simply not scored. Rephrase the rule in measurable terms and it becomes trackable.
Try it yourself
Add your first two rules and let CleaRank keep the score.
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CleaRank tools are for education and analysis. Nothing in this guide is financial advice.