Introducing Tessera: the trading journal that tests rule changes on your own trades

Tessera is a trading journal and analysis platform that does something most journals do not: it lets you test a rule change against the trades you have already taken, and see what your profit and loss would have been.

Not a backtest of a strategy over market history. Your actual fills, with a filter applied.

This post explains what Tessera does, who it fits, and who it does not.

What is Tessera?

Tessera is a trading dashboard built around a single loop: log your trades, analyse what was happening in the market when you took them, and test whether a change would have helped.

It has five parts:

• Trade log. Your trades, synced from your broker or imported from a file, plotted back on the chart with the price action they happened in.
• Statistics. Every standard metric across sessions, symbols, and market conditions. No proprietary score, no 0 to 100 grade with a formula we will not show you.
• Reports. Three of them, each answering one question. How did I trade? Should I have been in this trade at all? Were my stops and targets in the right place?
• Simulator. Take a finding from a report, apply it as a filter, and see your book with those trades removed or with different exits.
• Strategies and Workspace. Rules that hold up get saved to a strategy as numbered policy versions. Everything stays connected on a canvas, so you can see which report produced which simulation, and which simulation produced which rule.

If you trade from a Pine script on TradingView, Tessera can write a proven policy into a copy of your existing script for you to paste back.

What makes it different from a normal trading journal?

Two things.

It measures the market, rather than asking you to remember it

Most journals let you tag a trade as "trending" or "choppy" and filter on that tag later. That tag is your memory of the trade, typed in after you closed it.

Tessera reads the price action itself. At the moment of each entry, with no lookahead, it measures around twenty conditions: volatility regime, trend direction over long and short horizons, momentum, where price sat relative to its moving averages, how close it was to support or resistance, whether the higher timeframes agreed, which session you were in.

That difference matters more than it sounds, because it means you can ask questions you could not otherwise ask. Not "how did I do in trades I labelled as trending," but "how did I do when ADX was actually above 25." This is what Entry Analysis is built on.

Findings become rules, not just paragraphs

A finding in most journals is text. You read that you lose money in low volatility, and then the real work starts. Decide whether it is real. Work out the rule. Remember it next session. Hold to it when the trade is in front of you.

Most findings die somewhere in that gap.

In Tessera a finding carries the filter that produced it. Send it to the simulator and see what your book looks like without those trades. Keep what holds up as a policy on your strategy. Combine two policies that both worked and test the pair.

How is this different from backtesting?

A backtest replays a strategy over market history and generates trades that never happened. The results depend on assumptions about fills, spreads, and how the strategy would have behaved.

A Tessera simulation starts from your closed trades. The trades that stay keep the profit and loss they actually made. Only the trades you remove, or the exits you move, change anything.

That has one big advantage and one real limitation.

• The advantage: it measures you, not just the strategy. Your book includes every deviation, hesitation, and discretionary override you made. If you break your own rules in the London session, a backtest of your strategy will never show it. Your own trades will.
• The limitation: sample size. A backtest can run ten thousand trades. You might have two hundred. This is why Tessera attaches a confidence score and a sample size to every finding, and will not surface a slice below a minimum number of trades.

Backtesting is for developing a strategy. Tessera is for fixing one you are already trading.

What does a real finding look like?

Here is the shape of it, using a gold cohort as an example.

Look at performance by session and London/New York looks mildly weak. Twenty-four trades, 29 percent win rate, down $45. Easy to walk past.

Look at the combination of session and market direction, and the actual hole appears. Long-horizon direction up, during London/New York: fifteen trades, 13 percent win rate, down $207.

The session is not the problem. The session when the market was trending up is. A profit-and-loss-by-session chart shows the first number and hides the second.

That combination becomes a filter, the filter becomes a simulation, and if the simulation holds up it becomes a rule saved to the strategy.

Who is Tessera for?

Best fit: traders whose rules stay recognisably the same

If you trade a written playbook, a fixed setup, or a systematic rule set, most of Tessera is built for you. Intraday or swing does not matter. What matters is that the conditions at entry are repeatable enough that a pattern found in the past means something for the future.

That includes:

• Traders with a written playbook. Same session, defined setup, clear invalidation.
• Algo and systematic traders. A bot or fixed rule set takes the trades and you want to know which conditions are carrying the results.
• TradingView strategy developers. You build in Pine, and you want your live results and your script in the same place.
• Traders coming off a spreadsheet. The journal died after two weeks and you want something that survives past the novelty.
• Traders whose backtests did not survive live. The equity curve looked perfect in testing and reality disagreed.

Partial fit: discretionary and multi-setup traders

If you run several setups and context changes your approach trade by trade, some of Tessera fits and some does not.

The trade log, statistics, trade review, and notes all work fine. They will tell you plenty.

Policies and entry filters are where it gets weaker. They assume repeatable conditions at entry. If your rules shift from trade to trade, then removing trades that match a condition on past data is thin evidence for what happens next. Use the simulator on one setup you can name, rather than building rule trees across your whole account.

We would rather say that than have you sign up expecting something the product cannot do.

What Tessera is not

• Not a broker. Tessera does not place trades, close positions, or move funds. You trade at your broker. Tessera reads the history.
• Not financial advice. Reports, findings, and suggested distances are analysis of your own past trades, presented for your review. Every trading decision is yours.
• Not a forecast. Reports look at closed trades. They tell you what happened, not what will happen.
• No invented score. There is no Tessera Score. No 0 to 100 grade summarising your trading against someone else's idea of a good process. See what Statistics shows instead.
• No mood tracking. No feelings dropdown, no daily reflection prompts, no discipline rating. If that is what you want from a journal, there are tools that do it well and this is not one of them.
• Not always confident. Exit analysis runs four checks before it suggests changing anything. If moving to breakeven would have cut your winners short, or a trailing stop had no room to work, it says so and tells you which check failed. Sometimes the answer is to leave it alone. More on Exit Analysis.

Getting your trades in

Tessera connects to brokers in three ways.

• Live sync for Liquid Brokers, OANDA, Interactive Brokers, cTrader, and Binance Spot. Read access only. We never request permission to trade.
• File import for MetaTrader 4 and 5, Tradovate, NinjaTrader, Hyperliquid, and TradingView. Export from your platform and upload.
• Custom CSV for anything else. Map the columns yourself, preview before importing, and save the mapping as a template for next time. If your platform can export a file, Tessera can read it.

See the full list of supported brokers.

Frequently asked questions

What is Tessera?

Tessera is a trading journal and analysis platform that logs your trades, measures the market conditions present at each entry, and lets you test rule changes against the trades you have already taken.

Does Tessera place trades for me?

No. Tessera is not a broker. It reads your trade history so you can analyse it. You execute at your broker.

How is Tessera different from a backtester?

A backtester generates hypothetical trades from a strategy and market history. Tessera works only with trades you actually took, so the profit and loss on the trades that remain is real rather than modelled.

Do I need to know Pine Script?

No. The Pine Script features are optional. Without them, Tessera works as a full trading journal, statistics suite, report engine, and simulator.

Which brokers does Tessera support?

Live sync is available for Liquid Brokers, OANDA, Interactive Brokers, cTrader, and Binance Spot. File import covers MetaTrader 4 and 5, Tradovate, NinjaTrader, Hyperliquid, and TradingView. A custom CSV importer handles anything else. Full broker list.

Does Tessera use AI?

Only for one thing: generating the written summary text in reports. Your trading data is not used to train any AI model. Every number in a report comes from your trades, not from a model.

What does Tessera cost?

Standard is $19 per month and Plus is $39 per month, with lower rates when billed yearly. A launch offer is currently running. See full pricing.

Where to start

If you are already trading a defined approach, the fastest way to see whether Tessera fits is to import three months of history and run a Performance Review. It needs no symbol or timeframe, and it will tell you within a few minutes whether the picture it gives you is one you did not already have.

Create an account, read more about how reports work, or browse the help centre for setup guides.

Trading carries a high level of risk and is not suitable for everyone. You can lose more than your initial deposit. Nothing in this post is financial advice.