What Is a Trade Recorder?
A trade recorder is a tool that captures a trade at the moment it is decided, seals it with a timestamp before the fact, and publishes it afterwards on a log that cannot be edited. It records intent rather than importing results, which is what separates it from a trading journal.
What does a trade recorder do?
Three things, in this order, and the order is the definition:
- Capture before the fact. The trade is recorded while the result is genuinely unknown, so what exists afterwards is a prediction rather than a description.
- Fix the timestamp immediately. Precedence is settled at the moment of the commit, independently of when anyone is allowed to read the contents.
- Publish on a log nobody can revise. Including the person who wrote it, which is the part that makes the first two worth anything.
Every other property is downstream of those three. Take any one away and the artifact turns into something else that already has a name.
How is it different from a trading journal?
A journal imports or transcribes what already happened, and it is editable on purpose — a private working document you cannot revise is a worse tool for improving. A recorder captures what you intend, and is not editable on purpose. Same subject matter, opposite requirements.
The practical test is whether the artifact could have been produced this morning about last year. A journal could. A record of what you committed to, timestamped as you committed to it, could not — and that impossibility is the entire source of its value.
What is it not?
| Category | What it does | What it cannot establish |
|---|---|---|
| Trading journal | Analyses trades you already made | When any entry was written, or what is missing |
| Account verifier | Confirms an account really returned what it says | Which account, which period, or whether others exist |
| Signal service | Sells calls to subscribers | Anything, unless it also keeps a record it cannot edit |
| Copy-trading platform | Mirrors one account's fills into another | Intent — it moves positions, it does not record decisions |
| Trade recorder | Fixes what you said, when you said it | Whether the plan was any good — that is what the record is for finding out |
The verifier row is the one people find surprising. Confirming that an account returned 40% is a real service and it answers a real question, but it is a question about arithmetic on a data set somebody chose. Selection happens before verification and no amount of verification reaches back past it.
Who needs one?
- Anyone about to be assessed. A prop firm or a trading partner is deciding whether to put something at risk on you, and they know the document in front of them was assembled by the person it flatters.
- Anyone who publishes calls. A caller with a complete, unrevisable archive answers the only question that actually gets asked, in one link.
- Anyone whose own discipline is the problem. A commitment you cannot quietly revise afterwards behaves differently to one you can, which is a use with no audience at all.
- Anyone with no capital yet. A recorder logs decisions rather than fills, so a record can exist before an account big enough to be worth verifying does.
What does the record contain?
The record keeps the exact message the trader wrote alongside the trade commands parsed from it. The parse powers the stats; the original words are what make the parse checkable, because anyone auditing the record can re-read what was actually said. A misread parse can be flagged and corrected on review; the original text never changes.
Public profiles carry PnL, RME, correlation to SPX, mean R:R and trade count over 30, 100 and 200-day windows. Only closed trades appear on a public profile or the community board. Open positions stay off both, even after the capsule has opened, so a live edge is never given away. A trade can stay open for up to 200 days; one that is never explicitly exited counts as closed at the 200-day mark, or at the option's expiry, whichever comes first.
How does a reader check it?
Every trade command is appended to a tamper-evident log the moment it is received. kappi builds a Merkle tree of the new entries and publishes its single root hash to the public Hedera ledger. Anyone can check an exported log against those published hashes and confirm nothing was added, removed, re-ordered or back-dated — without trusting kappi.
That independence is what distinguishes a record from a certificate. "We checked it and it is fine" asks a reader to trust a verifier's incentives instead of a trader's, which is a smaller ask but the same kind of ask. Recomputing a hash is not an ask at all.
What does it cost to keep one?
kappi is $15 a month with no free tier — $180 a year, which is 0.72% of a $25,000 account and 0.36% of a $50,000 one. kappi is broker-agnostic. Commits are made from the Chrome extension, so any brokerage works — or your own journal, kept wherever you already keep it. No import, no account linking, no requirement to trade inside someone else's platform.
Broker-import journals prove what you did after the fact, from data you control. kappi timestamps what you said you would do, before you knew how it would turn out, on a record you cannot edit.
Is any of this new?
The two halves are both older than the category. Presenting performance completely rather than selectively is codified in the CFA Institute's GIPS standards, which rest on fair representation and full disclosure across every portfolio in a composite[1]. Proving a document existed at a time without revealing its contents was solved by Haber and Stornetta in 1991, by hashing documents and linking the hashes so the issuer cannot forge the date.[2]
What is new is only the combination, and who it is for. Both of those ideas were built for institutions with compliance departments. A trade recorder is what they look like when the user is one person with a brokerage account and something to prove — $15 a month, no free tier.
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Frequently asked questions
What is a trade recorder?
A tool that captures a trade at the moment it is decided, seals it with a timestamp before the fact, and publishes it afterwards on a log that cannot be edited — including by the person who wrote it.
Is a trade recorder the same as a trading journal?
No. A journal imports or transcribes what already happened and should be editable, because it is a private tool for improving. A recorder captures intent before the fact and must not be editable, because its audience is somebody with reason to doubt you.
Do I need a brokerage account to use a trade recorder?
No. A recorder logs decisions rather than fills, so a record can be built before there is an account worth verifying. kappi is broker-agnostic and requires no import or account linking.
Is a trade recorder a signal service?
No. It records what a trader commits to and publishes it when the capsule opens; the record is theirs to share, with whoever they choose. Recording and selling calls are separate activities, and only the first produces evidence.
How much does a trade recorder cost?
kappi is $15 a month with no free tier, which is $180 a year — 0.36% of a $50,000 account. Adjacent journal products mostly run higher, but they answer a different question.