Setting and Tracking Goals
A goal in the CleaRank Trade Journal is a target you write down and then have to look at. It sits beside your trading rules in the Plans & Rules tab, but unlike a rule it is never scored against your trades. Rules and the Discipline score are covered in Goals, Trading Rules, and Discipline Tracking. Goals are deliberately simple: a title, a period, a number to hit, and where you stand right now.
Goals and rules do different jobs
The Trade Journal holds two kinds of commitment and it is worth keeping them apart.
- A rule is a constraint on behavior, for example “always use a stop loss” or “max 3 trades per day”. Rules are checked against every closed trade automatically, including the simulator trades that mirror into your journal, and they produce your Discipline score. They are covered in Goals and Trading Rules.
- A goal is an outcome you are aiming at over a period, for example “take 40 trades this quarter with a stop on every one”. Nothing about a goal is enforced. It exists so that progress is visible and so that the review you do at the end of the month has a stated target to compare against.
If you only ever set one goal, make it a process goal rather than a profit goal. You control how many rules you keep and how much you risk. You do not control what the market pays you this month.
Creating a goal
- Open Plans & Rules. In the Trade Journal, choose the Plans & Rules tab. Goals sit in the Goals list on the left, rules in the Rules list beside them.
- Choose New goal. The New Goal form opens in a dialog.
- Name it. The Goal field is a plain sentence. Write it the way you would say it out loud, for example “Keep discipline above 80 percent this month”. The example text in the field suggests a profit target, but the field takes anything.
- Pick the period. Period offers Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Quarterly. This is a label for the goal, so match it to how often you actually review. Monthly suits most traders; daily goals only make sense if you sit down at the end of each session.
- Set the numbers. Target is the number that counts as done. Current is where you stand today, and it starts at zero. Both accept decimals.
- Add a description, then create. The optional Description is the place to record why this goal and what you will change if you miss it. Choose Create to save.
Reading the goal card
Each saved goal becomes a card showing its title, its period, a progress bar, and a label in the form “current / target (percent)”. The bar is color coded so you can read a list of goals at a glance:
- Green from 75 percent up. On track or done.
- Amber from 40 to 74 percent. Live but behind pace, which matters most near the end of the period.
- Red below 40 percent. Either the goal was too ambitious for the period or the period got away from you. Both are worth writing down in the description rather than quietly raising the target next time.
The pencil icon on a card reopens the goal as Edit Goal, where you can change any field, including Current, or delete the goal. Deleting asks for confirmation and cannot be undone.
Keeping progress up to date
You type the Current value in yourself, which means updating it is part of your review rather than something that happens without you. That is less magical than it sounds, and it is also the point: the act of looking up the real number and typing it in is the review.
Get the number from the places that work it out for you rather than from memory:
- Profit, win rate, profit factor, expectancy, max drawdown: the Performance at a Glance cards on the journal dashboard, with the window selector set to match your goal period.
- Discipline percentage: the Discipline card on the same row, or the Rule Compliance Breakdown in Journal Analytics.
- Trade counts and per-setup results: the Setup Performance table in Journal Analytics.
Goals worth setting
CleaRank does not prescribe targets, so here are defensible ones drawn from the benchmarks the rest of the documentation uses.
- Discipline above 80 percent for the month. Above 80 percent is healthy. Between 60 and 79 is a warning. Below 60 usually means over-trading or position size creeping up, and the fix is almost always fewer trades rather than better ones.
- A stop-loss recorded on every trade. Target equals your trade count for the period. This one goal fixes your R-multiple charts, your MAE and MFE reading, and your average R at the same time, because all three are calculated from the stop.
- Risk per trade held between 1 and 2 percent. At 1 percent, ten losses in a row costs about 10 percent of the account, which is recoverable. At 5 percent it is not. Use the Position Size calculator to size each trade to the number you committed to.
- Profit factor above 1.5 over at least 30 trades. Profit factor is gross wins divided by gross losses. Anything above 1.0 is net profitable, and 1.5 or better is a comfortable edge. Below 1.0 you are losing money, and the lever is usually the size of the average loss rather than the win rate.
- Positive expectancy after costs. Expectancy is your average result per trade once fees are in. Multiply it by the trades you expect to take in the period and you have a realistic profit goal instead of a wished-for one.
A profit goal with a deadline is the most reliable way to make a trader take a position they would otherwise skip. If you set one, pair it with a rule that caps trades per day so the goal cannot quietly override your process.
Frequently asked questions
Where do I find goals in the app?
In the Trade Journal, open the Plans & Rules tab. Goals are the list on the left with a New goal button.
What periods can a goal use?
Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Quarterly. The period is a label on the goal, so pick the one that matches how often you actually sit down and review.
Can a goal be about something other than money?
Yes. You can write anything in the title and the target is just a number, so a goal can count trades, rule compliance percentage, R-multiples, or anything else you can measure. Process goals tend to be more useful than profit goals because you control the input.
How many goals should I keep active?
Three or fewer. In practice a list longer than that stops being a commitment and becomes a wish list.
What happens when I delete a goal?
CleaRank asks you to confirm, then removes it permanently. Your trades, rules and statistics are untouched, because a goal is only a target and holds none of your trades.
Try it yourself
Set one process goal for this month and put the number where you will see it.
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CleaRank tools are for education and analysis. Nothing in this guide is financial advice.