Should a trading journal be public?

Public when you need someone else to verify results, private when it is purely a thinking tool. They are different jobs, and using one document for both usually degrades the private one into marketing.

How do I publish trades without giving away live positions?

Use a time-capsuled delay: the commit is sealed and timestamped immediately but only becomes readable later, once the position is no longer actionable.

What should I leave out of a public trading journal?

Account balance, dollar position sizes, broker and identity are all unnecessary. Percentages and R-multiples convey performance without disclosing account size.

Can I choose which trades to publish?

Yes. Commit and journal the trades you have the most conviction in — those are the ones worth putting on a record that still stands up months later.

Public Trading Journal · Publish Without Giving It Away

A public trading journal is worth keeping when you need someone else to believe your results, and costly when it exposes live positions or a method you sell. A time-capsuled delay resolves most of the tension: commit now, publish later, prove both.

Two different jobs

A private journal is a thinking tool. Its value is that you write honestly in it — including the trades you are embarrassed by, which are the informative ones. Publishing tends to degrade that: people write differently when they know they are read, and a journal written for an audience quietly becomes marketing.

A public journal is an evidence tool. Its value is that someone else can check it. That value is entirely destroyed by editing, so the two jobs pull in opposite directions — the private journal wants to be revisable, the public one must not be.

The mistake is trying to make one document do both. The resolution is a record that is fixed at commit time, with your private analysis kept separately.

Three genuine costs of publishing

Front-running and crowding. A publicly visible live position invites others in ahead of you, and in anything less than deeply liquid instruments that moves your fills.

Giving away a live edge. A call published the instant it is made is available to everyone at once, whether or not they have any relationship with you.

Permanence. A public record of a bad quarter does not expire. This is a real cost and it is also the source of the credibility — a record that could be withdrawn after a bad month would prove nothing.

Where a delay helps

A commit is timestamped and sealed at the moment it is made, so precedence is established, but it is not readable until the time capsule opens. By the time it is public the position is no longer live, which is what takes the front-running and crowding cost off the table. The record stays yours to share, with whoever you choose, wherever you already talk to them.

What the delay does not resolve is permanence, and it should not. A record you can retract is not evidence.

What to publish

Publish the trade: instrument, direction, entry, stop, target, size, and when it was committed. That is the part a reader needs in order to check that the outcome matched the commitment.

You do not need to publish your account balance, your position sizing in dollars, your broker, your reasoning, or your identity. Percentages and R-multiples carry everything an evaluator needs about performance without disclosing the size of your account — and R-multiples are more informative anyway, because they normalise for account growth.

When the choosing happens

Every record involves a choice about what goes into it. What decides whether the record means anything is when that choice is made.

Choosing after the fact is the failure. A journal you publish selectively once you know how each trade went is a highlight reel with extra steps, and the bias is invisible to you as well as to the reader — a losing trade genuinely does feel less representative afterwards.

Choosing before the fact is not the same act at all. Commit the trades you have conviction in, by all means: you are deciding while the result is still unknown, so the selection cannot be sorted by how it turned out. And once committed, a trade cannot be dropped because it went badly. That is the property doing the work — not that you had no choice, but that you made it blind.

How kappi handles it

Commits are sealed securely on the client-side, before the fact, and published when the time capsule opens, on a Merkle-anchored log that cannot be edited. Profiles are public by default and carry PnL, RME, correlation to SPX, mean R:R and trade count across 30, 100 and 200-day windows. A profile can be set private, which removes it from public indexes. That is a whole-profile setting rather than a per-trade one, so a published profile is never a subset of itself. $15/month, no free tier.

The completeness question has a professional answer worth borrowing. The GIPS standards require performance across every portfolio in a composite, on the principles of fair representation and full disclosure^[1] — the point being that what you leave out is the part a reader cannot price. A published journal inherits the same test.

kappi is a trade recorder: you commit a trade before the fact, it is sealed on your device for a time-capsuled delay you choose, and published afterwards on a Merkle-anchored log a reader can check without kappi's cooperation. $15/month, no free tier.

Should Your Trading Journal Be Public?