Why TradeBook keeps your journal in your browser

TradeBook is a trading journal for Indian markets. It is also a little unusual: it has no sign-up, no account and no server database. Every trade you log is stored in your own browser, on your own device.

This was a deliberate choice, and it shapes almost everything about the product.

A trading journal is sensitive

A journal holds your entries, your exits, your position sizes, your losses and your reasoning. Put together, it is a detailed picture of your money and how you handle it.

Most journaling tools ask you to hand all of that to their servers before you have logged a single trade. We did not think a journal needed to work that way. The calculations a journal does, such as P&L, open risk, win rate and R-multiples, can all run on your own machine.

So TradeBook keeps your data in your browser's storage (IndexedDB). Our servers never see your trades.

What still goes over the network

"Nothing uploaded" should be exact, so here is what TradeBook does fetch:

• End-of-day prices. Once per trading day, after 5 PM IST, TradeBook downloads the official NSE and BSE bhav copies. These are public exchange files. Your trades are not sent anywhere to get them.
• Company logos. Your browser asks Logo.dev for the logo of each stock you trade, which means Logo.dev sees the ticker being looked up. If no logo service is configured, TradeBook shows initials instead.

That is the full list.

What local-first makes possible

Keeping everything on your device is not only about privacy. It also makes TradeBook fast and simple:

• No account to create. Open it and start logging.
• Instant. Filtering by strategy, switching months and sorting trades never waits on a server.
• Works on a bad connection. Your journal is already on your device.

What it costs

Local-first has real trade-offs, and we would rather state them plainly:

• No automatic sync. A journal on your laptop is not on your phone. To move it, export a JSON backup from settings and import it on the other device.
• Backups are your job. If you clear your browser's site data, the journal goes with it. We cannot recover it, because we never had it. Export a backup now and then.
• No live prices. TradeBook uses end-of-day closing prices, not a live feed. For swing and positional trading that is usually what you want. It is not a tool for intraday monitoring.

Built for how trades actually play out

The other reason we built TradeBook is that spreadsheets break on the trades that matter most.

A spreadsheet works until you book half a position, trail your stop twice and exit the rest a week later. TradeBook handles those cases directly:

• Partial exits keep their own date, price and charges, so profit is booked in the month you actually took it.
• Every trade keeps its initial stop, which defines 1R. Trailing the stop later never changes your R-multiple, so the numbers stay honest.
• Symbol search covers about 42,000 NSE and BSE stocks, futures and options, and fills in the instrument type, lot size and last close for you.

The short version

Your journal should be as private as a notebook in your drawer, and as useful as good software can make it. Keeping it in your browser is how we get both.