Getting started

Getting started in ten minutes

Create an account, get your trades in, and read your first health score.

Alpha Ledger is useful from the first trade, but it gets sharply more useful at about thirty. Here is the fastest route.

1. Create your account

Every new account starts with a 7-day Premium trial and no card. When the trial ends the account drops to Free on its own — nothing is charged and nothing is deleted.

2. Get your trades in

Three ways, in order of how little work they are:

Connect your broker. Settings → Accounts → Add account. Use your investor password or a read-only API key. Trades then arrive on their own every five minutes.
Import a statement. Journal → Import. CSV, XLSX or a MetaTrader HTML report. Alpha Ledger guesses the column mapping, shows you a preview, and remembers the mapping for next time.
Add them by hand. The + Add trade button, or press n anywhere in the app. About twenty seconds each, with P&L, R and risk calculated as you type.

3. Check the server timezone

If you import from MetaTrader, set the broker server offset before you import. Most MT servers run GMT+2 or GMT+3. Getting it wrong shifts every trade into the wrong session and makes the time analytics meaningless.

4. Write one session plan

Plans → New plan. Four minutes: your bias, your key levels, your maximum trades and your daily loss limit.

This is the single strongest predictor of results in the journal. Traders who write a plan follow it about 85% of the time. Traders who do not have nothing to follow.

5. Read your health score

The dashboard health score is 0–10 across six weighted factors: profit factor, average R, drawdown control, plan compliance, consistency and risk stability. Open the breakdown and look at the weakest one — each factor carries a specific instruction for raising it.

What to do next

Tag ten trades with the setup you used, so the playbook can start measuring which of your rules carry an edge.
Ask the coach "why am I losing?" — it will name the hour, the instrument and the habit costing you money.
Open Mistakes and look at the top item. That is your first focus.