TradeOnyx grades every reviewed trade on two independent axes:
- Execution Grade (A / B / C / D / F) — how well you executed the plan you set. Did you enter at the level you said you'd enter? Did you honour the stop? Did you take the target you stated, or scalp out? F is plan-deviation, A is mechanical adherence to your own pre-trade rules.
- Setup Grade (A+ / A / B / C / D) — how good the plan was, in retrospect. A+ is "this should have been one of the season's best setups regardless of outcome." D is "I shouldn't have taken this."
Both are captured in the trade-detail modal review section. They are independent — a trade can be A execution + D setup (great trader, bad idea) or F execution + A+ setup (excellent setup, fumbled the trade). The two-axis split is the entire point.
What the four-quadrant grid tells you: - A execution + A+ setup — the dream cell. These are the trades you replicate. Use the journal entry as a future-reference template. - A execution + D setup — "I traded the plan well but the plan was bad." The setup-selection process is the leak. Re-examine pre-trade criteria. - F execution + A+ setup — "the trade was right, I was wrong." Trade-management leak. Move-stop discipline, target-discipline, or premature-scalp habit. Pair with the mistake tags. - F execution + D setup — the trade you wish you hadn't taken. Worth a journal note: what was the regime, the mood, the time of day? These are the trades that compound into a losing month if you don't isolate them. - Average grade trends matter more than any single trade. Execution grade trending from B-average to A-average over six months is the strongest improvement signal in the system. Setup grade flat over six months means your setup-selection isn't getting smarter — that's a development frontier.
The signature use is the post-loss honesty test. Every trader who's just lost money on a losing trade is tempted to grade it harshly. The two-axis split forces honesty: maybe execution was actually A, the setup was the C — i.e. you played a bad hand correctly. Or maybe execution was D and the setup was A+ — you fumbled a real opportunity. The two answers point to completely different fixes.
TradeOnyx exposes both grades as columns in the Trades tab, filterable, sortable. The strongest analytical filter in the product is execution=A, P&L<0: the trades where you did everything right and still lost money. That subset's Win Rate, WLR, and Expectancy are the cleanest read of your strategy's edge — outcome variance, not skill variance.
The pairing with the discipline scorecard: the Execution grade feeds directly into the Plan-adherence axis of the four-axis discipline metric. A trader whose Execution grade trends up over months sees their discipline score rise on the same axis without doing anything else. The two systems agree by design.