Stop Loss

A stop loss is a pre-planned order that closes a trade at a fixed price to limit loss if the market moves against you. It is the core risk management tool in trading: it defines the maximum you can lose on a trade and turns an open position into a bounded risk. Consistent use of stop losses is one of the strongest predictors of long-term survival, and reviewing whether you actually honor your stops is a primary use of a journal. In Dusk Analyst you can record planned versus actual stops and review how often you move or abandon them.

Log the stop level and the actual exit for each trade; the journal's risk analytics show how often stops held and what the realized loss was when they did not.

Stop Loss is one of the metrics your journal should track, because it shows up in every review: it changes how you size trades, how you read your equity curve and how honestly you can assess an edge. Log it alongside each trade (or let your journal derive it from entry and exit data) so patterns - not anecdotes - drive your decisions. The glossary entry above explains the term itself; the journal's job is to make it measurable in your own history.

Dusk Analyst calculates Stop Loss from the trades you log or sync, and shows it per account and across time in the journal views and reports. On the free tier, log trades manually or import CSV and the metric updates automatically; on Pro, the MT4/MT5/cTrader/NinjaTrader connectors keep the data flowing without entry. Weekly reports on Pro surface how Stop Loss is trending, so it's part of the review loop rather than a number you have to compute by hand.

For funded traders, Stop Loss isn't optional - prop firms build their rules around it (daily loss limits, maximum drawdown, consistency requirements), and violations end accounts. A journal that tracks Stop Loss per account keeps the compliance picture clear: you can see your buffer in real time instead of discovering at payout time that a rule was breached. Dusk Analyst keeps funded accounts separate with their own starting balance and limits, so Stop Loss stays visible against the firm's actual numbers.

Yes. The free tier costs $0 forever and includes two accounts, manual trade entry and CSV import - enough to journal a live account properly, with win rate, P&L and equity curve all calculated for you. There is no credit card required to start. Pro ($25/month flat) adds unlimited accounts, MT4/MT5/cTrader/NinjaTrader auto-sync, AI insights on your trading (1,000 trade-analyses a month), monthly reports and full export, and every new account gets Pro free for 5 trading days with no card. The pricing is deliberately simple: one plan, one price, no per-feature upsells.

Yes, and it needs no card. Every new Dusk Analyst account gets Pro free for 5 trading days from sign-up: auto-sync from MT4, MT5, cTrader and NinjaTrader 8, AI Insights with 1,000 credits, monthly reports and unlimited accounts. After that Pro is $25/month, and you can cancel anytime from Billing in the app. If you skip it, the account moves to Free with every trade kept.

Yes - CSV import is available on every plan, including free. If you've been tracking trades in a spreadsheet, broker export or another journal, export the CSV from wherever it lives and import it into Dusk Analyst; the journal matches it against your accounts and keeps your history continuous. Import is also the fallback for platforms that don't run MT4, MT5, cTrader or NinjaTrader 8. For MT4/MT5/cTrader/NinjaTrader terminals, Pro auto-syncs going forward and the EA backfills any trades your terminal missed while it was off. Any platform that exports a CSV of your trade history works. Dusk Analyst recognises TradingView, Tradovate, cTrader, MT4 and MT5 exports on sight; for anything else you map your columns once and that parser is saved for next time. Comma, semicolon and tab files are all handled, day-first and month-first dates are detected from the file itself, and any row that cannot be read is listed for you rather than dropped quietly.

Pro includes 1,000 AI trade-analyses every month. One credit covers one trade, so asking a question about a 40-trade week costs 40 credits and you can keep asking. The allowance resets on the 1st of each month and the counter sits in the top bar of the app, so you always know where you stand. Narrowing a question to one account or a shorter date range makes the same allowance go much further. Free accounts get a small number of AI credits to try AI Insights, alongside the full journal, analytics and weekly reports, and the free Pro week (5 trading days, no card) includes the full monthly allowance.