Mood-pre and mood-post are simple 1-5 sliders rendered as glyph buttons in the trade-detail modal. 1 = stressed/tilted/exhausted; 5 = calm/clear/focused. The slider is intentionally shallow — five levels, one click — because deeper instruments (10-point scales, free-text mood entries) get skipped during fast trading.
Mood-pre is captured at trade entry when you open the modal during the trade. Mood-post is captured at trade close, after you've seen the outcome. Both are timestamped; both are part of the trade's review row, queryable + filterable.
What the data shows after enough samples: - Mood-pre 1-2 → P&L distribution skews negative. The most common pattern. Tilted entries don't pay. The actionable rule: don't enter the trade. The mood slider becomes a pre-flight checklist. - Mood-pre 4-5 + Mood-post 1-2 — a winning trade you didn't enjoy. Usually means you held too long, gave back, or scalped out before the runner. Worth a Sunday-review look. - Mood-pre 1-2 + Mood-post 4-5 — relief, not satisfaction. A losing trade you thought was going worse than it actually went. Risk lesson: your stop sizing was probably too small for the entry conviction. - Mood-pre = Mood-post for 80% of trades — the slider isn't capturing anything. Either you're under-using it (clicking 3 every time, default) or your trading day is unusually flat. Calibrate. - Mood-post correlates more with P&L than mood-pre — natural; you've seen the result. The real value of mood-pre is its independence from outcome.
TradeOnyx exposes mood as a column in the Trades tab and as a filter dimension on the Overview. Filter the Trades tab by mood-pre = 1 or 2; the Overview's KPI tiles recompute on that subset. If your expectancy on "low-mood entries" is dramatically negative versus the global, you have a behavioural rule: stop trading when you're tilted.
The pairing with the streak-warning notification: after three consecutive losses, the dispatcher fires an inbox row ("three losses in a row — consider stepping away"). The mood slider is what makes that warning actionable — pull up the next trade, and if mood-pre is < 3, the system has now told you twice (warning + your own data) that this is a trade to skip.
The long-arc value: after six months, mood-pre + mood-post become a trader-personality fingerprint. Compare across regimes (volatile vs. ranging weeks), across symbols (FX vs. indices), across times (morning vs. afternoon). The goal is not the average — it's the outliers, the moods you're most prone to and the conditions that produce them.