Sessionbook

I trade forex on prop-firm accounts. The journals I found were overpriced for what you get back, so I built my own. It gives you full control of your data and builds a dashboard around it, so you get proper insight into how your trading is doing overall.

Forex and prop traders need more from a journal than a list of trades:

• A broker exports individual deals, not trades. One position can have several entries and exits.
• Prop accounts have their own costs, payouts and rules to track.
• Reviewing a day or a week matters as much as reviewing a single trade.

One app with these screens: dashboard (customisable cards), trades, trade detail, day view, calendar, weekly review, reports, notebook, strategies, backtesting, progress, prop business, accounts, import center and settings, plus a public landing page.

Specific features:

• MT5 import. A deal-history CSV becomes closed trades. Deals are grouped by position; the net result, lot-weighted entry and exit prices, fees and swap come from the deals. A position imported twice is reported as "Already imported". Anything ambiguous (open or partly closed positions, unknown instruments, a different currency) is reported, not guessed.
• Reports and review. Breakdowns, trends, comparing groups, a weekly review, and a day plan with a checklist.
• Strategies and backtesting. Strategies with readiness criteria, a backtest trade editor and a replay log, and a comparison of backtest against live results.
• Customisation. Draggable dashboard cards, and a header background picked from shipped designs or an uploaded image.
• Demo workspace. Anyone can try the app without an account; demo data is kept separate from a real journal.

• Journal data stays in the browser at first (localStorage, IndexedDB for images). The app works with no account and no server. The cost: no sync between devices until the backend is connected.
• Business logic lives in a UI-free src/domain folder, with tests. Metrics, imports and migrations can be tested without a browser, and the backend can reuse the same rules.
• Money uses Decimal, never floats. Float rounding errors are not acceptable in a P&L figure.
• Strict schema validation and explicit migrations; invalid data blocks writes instead of being discarded. A journal is a record. Silently dropping data on a schema change is worse than refusing to save.
• MT5 server time has no default; the user chooses the clock. The export carries no time-zone offset and it cannot be derived from the file. A wrong guess moves trades to the wrong day.
• React Aria Components with a custom CSS kit. It was the only option I found with date pickers and a sortable, selectable table, and it gives control over the markup. Light theme only.
• NestJS, Prisma and PostgreSQL for the API. Decided on October 24, 2026 after weighing Rust and Supabase. Decisions are recorded as ADRs in the repository.

• Screens were designed as boards in a design canvas first and then built to match them, one PR per screen.
• Two workstreams, frontend and backend, shared a written handoff (HANDOFF.md, an interface contract and a data inventory) and used main as the source of truth.
• Each feature carries tests: 46 unit-test files for the domain logic and more than 20 Playwright end-to-end specs, each with an accessibility (axe) scan.

• Row click versus selection on the trades table. Clicking a row opens a preview, the checkbox selects, and the bulk-action bar floats at the bottom so it does not push the content down.
• Scrollbars. A thin, light scrollbar on every screen, clipped to rounded corners. Chromium has no way to inset a scrollbar track, so the scroller is clipped with clip-path instead.
• Consistency by test. A unit test fails the build if a stylesheet uses a raw font size, radius or spacing value instead of a design token.

• The UI does not use the backend yet; sign-in is the only call, and only when switched on.
• Phone layouts are on hold; the app is desktop only for now.
• Economic events (a planned dashboard addition) are not built.

• Demo: openzilla.vercel.app/dashboard
• Contact: joy.0839b@gmail.com