Identifying Your Setups

Mining Your Trade History

The best place to find your real setups isn't a YouTube video or a trading forum. It's your own trade history.

If you've been logging trades in Tradapt, you already have data. This lesson walks through how to analyze it to identify which patterns you trade most — and which of those patterns actually make you money.

Step 1: Export or Review Your Trade History

In Tradapt, go to the Journal section. You're looking for patterns in your winning trades. Specifically:

• What did the price action look like before you entered?
• What was the market context? (Trending, ranging, breaking out)
• What time of day did these trades occur?
• What instrument were you trading?

Group similar trades together. You're looking for recurring patterns that show up across multiple winning trades.

Common Setup Categories

Most setups fall into one of these broad categories:

Trend Continuation — Price pulls back and resumes the primary trend. (e.g., pullback to 20 EMA, VWAP reclaim)

Breakout — Price breaks through a defined level with confirmation. (e.g., Opening Range Breakout, resistance breakout)

Reversal — Price has extended too far and snaps back. (e.g., mean reversion, gap fill)

Level Play — Trading a reaction at a key technical level. (e.g., support/resistance, daily open, prior close)

The Pattern Recognition Exercise

Look at your last 20–30 winning trades. For each one, write a one-sentence description of what triggered the entry.

You'll start to see clustering. Some version of the same pattern will repeat. Those are your setups.

Also look at your worst 10–15 losing trades. Are they often a recognizable type? That's a setup to either avoid or tighten significantly.

Quality vs. Quantity

A playbook with 2–3 well-defined setups is infinitely more valuable than one with 15 loosely defined ones. Start narrow.

Most traders find they have 1–3 setups that account for the majority of their profitable trades. Focus your playbook on those first.

Naming Your Setups

Give each setup a short, memorable name. Use the name consistently when tagging trades.

Good names: "ORB Long", "VWAP Reclaim", "Gap Fill Short", "Trend Pullback 20 EMA"

Inconsistent names cause fragmented data in your analytics — Tradapt can't know that "ORB" and "Opening Range Breakout" and "ORB Long" are the same setup unless you use the same tag every time.