Why I built Actal

Nothing was built for developing traders

I coach traders one-on-one, a few at a time, and I trade the same index futures every day alongside them. When I looked for a platform to run that work on, I did not like any of them. They were built for tracking trades: import, chart, report. None of them was built for the thing I actually do with a student, which is turning a person who takes trades into a trader who executes.

That work is not statistics. It is a plan before the open and an honest closeout after. It is a grade on every trade that has nothing to do with whether it made money. It is putting a price on a habit so the student stops arguing with it. It is picking one thing to fix, and only one, and holding them to it for a week.

So I had my own built

I had software built for my coaching, shaped around that loop and nothing else. It was for my students and for me, and it did the job: the plan lived next to the trades, the grades lived next to the plan, and the review at the end of the day was short enough that it actually happened.

Old students kept coming back to it

The signal was not that students liked it while we worked together. It was that they loved it and kept coming back to it after we were done. People who no longer needed me still wanted the loop. That is when it stopped being a coaching tool in my head and became something a trader should be able to have without a coach.

A proper journal for what matters

So I decided to build a proper journal for what matters, and that is Actal. It has every statistic you would expect, because you need them. But the product is the loop, and the difference from every other journal is that it makes you run it.

1. 1File a premarket plan before the open: A, B and C scenarios per market and a bias. No plan, and the calendar shows the day as unplanned.
2. 2Close the day out: which scenario played, and did you trade the plan. That answer becomes a weekly number and feeds the execution score.
3. 3Grade every trade on discipline, A to F, separate from what it made. Mistakes get tagged and priced.
4. 4Take one weekly focus, chosen from what cost you most, and watch its progress all week.
5. 5Do a monthly review: a reflection, your best and worst trades ranked by grade first, and goals for next month with live progress.

It is free while it is in beta, everything unlocked, no card, and the people in now lock in a founder's price for life. If you want to see how it stacks up against what you use today, the comparisons are written the same way this page is: honestly, and with the other side's case made properly.