Process notes need the same numbers as the desk
A journal in a separate notebook drifts from the blotter in a week. CoveredLoop keeps the journal inside Profit and Loss so a note about “chased a roll” sits on the day whose realized and unrealized figures you are actually reviewing. Calendar and Journal are not a different product. They are the daily layer of the same book that holds covered calls, credit spreads, and equities.
Journaling here is for your process, not for publishing a track record. Nothing on this page is investment advice. A well-tagged losing day is still a losing day. Use the risk disclosures and do not treat a calendar color as a signal.
What you can log
Log days and months with session tags, plan versus execution, and lessons learned. The point is to make post-trade review cheaper: why did this covered-call roll happen, did the spread get managed at the plan, was the size the size you wrote down before the open. History is sortable with the rest of trade history — symbol, account, strategy, date — so a note is not trapped in a date that you cannot find again.
You can add a note from trade history with one click when something happens mid-session and you do not want to wait for the evening recap. Export exists when you want a paper trail outside the app.
The calendar is P&L, not a sticker chart
The P&L calendar is built from the same realized and unrealized figures as the dashboard tiles and the account-balance rollforward. Chart by day, week, month, or year. Click through a day to the trades that produced it. Unrealized on the calendar is meant to follow live holdings for the accounts you have selected — the same definition as Current Unrealized on the summary — not a stale residual from a closed lot.
Overnight and session return can be viewed together where time-weighted return is shown on the dashboard. The journal does not invent a second P&L. If a day looks wrong, the fix is in the trades and marks, not in a parallel spreadsheet.
Distribution, rollforward, and the story of the book
Profit and Loss is one workspace: charts, allocation pies (portfolio type, account, symbol, sector, asset class), distribution of closed P&L, summary of long vs short, and an account-balance rollforward. The rollforward is opening equity, transfers, dividends and interest, margin interest, fees, realized gain and loss, unrealized for the period, and ending equity, with a column per account.
Sample and Manual use the cash ledger you enter. Live Tradier pulls ACH, dividends, interest, and fees from the brokerage activity log. That is why a journal note about a dividend day can sit next to the same cash line the rollforward already has — you are not reconciling two systems by hand.
Metrics when you want more than a diary
When the journal asks “is this process working,” the metrics suite is the other half: win percentage, win/loss ratio, Kelly, profit factor, expectancy, SQN, Sharpe, Calmar, Omega, and related ratios, recalculated for the accounts you select on sample, manual, or live data. Metrics without a journal are a scoreboard. A journal without metrics is a diary. CoveredLoop keeps both behind the same account filter.
Start on sample, keep the habit
Create a free account and open the sample portfolio. Click a day on the calendar, add a note, and see how it sits next to that day’s P&L. Manual mode lets you journal a book you type yourself (two accounts and twenty-five trades on the free tier). Paid plans remove those caps and enable Tradier live. The product tour for this area is on What We Offer; shorter notes are on Insights.
Try it on a sample book
Create a free account and open the sample portfolio — no card required. Manual accounts work the same way if you want to type your own trades. Tradier live and paper stay optional until you are ready. Already registered? Sign in.