Your journal already knows what you traded: the symbol, the time, the size, the result. What it doesn’t know is why you took the trade. Tags are how you tell it.
With tags, the questions get better. Not just “how did I do on QQQ?”, but “do my VWAP bounces pay?”, “what does FOMO cost me?” and the one most traders never check: “when my confluences line up, is the trade actually better than when only one of them shows up?”.
Over the last few days we shipped a round of small improvements to tags in SniperJournal, most of them requested by traders who use the app. This guide puts them together into one workflow: build a tag list that fits how you trade, tag fast, then measure.
Two kinds of tags: setups and mistakes
Every tag lives on one of two sides:
- Setup & Style — what you saw and how you traded it: price action patterns, ICT / SMC concepts, indicators, breakouts and your trade style (Scalp, Day Trade, Swing…). These are the tags you measure.
- Mistakes & Leaks — what went wrong: discipline, planning, psychology, execution and analysis errors. They feed Ghost Mode, which recalculates your numbers without the trades you marked as mistakes.
Open any trade, go to the Tags tab and click Add tags to see the full list. Each group shows how many tags it has; click a group to open it.
One distinction worth making early: a tag is not a strategy. A tag is an ingredient — a confluence, a pattern, a mistake. A strategy is the recipe: a documented plan with rules, which lives in the Playbook. Use tags for the ingredients and, when a combination keeps working, turn it into a Playbook strategy. That’s also why the table that ranks your tags is now called Tag Performance: each row is a tag, not a strategy.
Make the list yours
The standard list is a starting point. The tags you actually use are the ones that describe your own trading, so build them:
- Create a tag: type a name in the search box. If it doesn’t exist yet, you get Create “…” in Setups (or in Mistakes) — the button always tells you which side the tag goes to, and the switch next to it changes the side. Pick a group from the dropdown and press Enter.
- Create a group: click + New group in the section bar. Groups keep related tags together: “Confluences”, “Entry triggers”, “Session” — whatever matches the way you think.
- Rename or move your tags: open the My tags tab. Each of your tags has a pencil to rename it and a dropdown to move it to another group. Renaming a tag also updates every trade that already carries it.
- Rename or delete your groups: use the pencil and trash icons on the group row. Deleting a group never deletes its tags — they stay, just without a group.
- Hide the groups you never use: the crossed-out eye on a standard group hides it from your list. Hidden groups are listed at the bottom of the section (2 hidden groups · Show), so you can bring them back with one click.
- Star your favorites: the star next to a tag pins it to the top of the list.
Standard tags keep their names, because statistics and AutoTags rely on them. If one doesn’t fit, hide its group and create your own version.
Put it in your order
The order of the list is yours too. Click Reorder in the section bar, then drag a group by its handle or use the arrows. Standard groups and your own mix freely within each section. Click Done — or simply close the picker — and the order is saved.
Inside your own groups you can sort the tags themselves too: the up-and-down arrows on the group row put them in the order you think in — 4H, 1H, 15m, for example.
The order isn’t just cosmetic. On the trade, the tags you picked now appear grouped by their group and in your order, so you read a trade’s story at a glance instead of scanning one long row of chips.
Tag a whole week in one go
Tagging trade by trade is fine for today’s session. For a backlog — a week you never got around to, a batch you just imported — there’s a faster way.
Go to Trades, click Select, pick the trades (filter by date and use Select All to grab a whole range) and click Add tags in the selection bar. Choose the tags once and click Apply to all.
A few rules make it safe to use:
- Tags are added to the ones each trade already has. Nothing is removed.
- A new trade style (Scalp, Day Trade, Swing) replaces the previous one, so a trade never ends up as both a scalp and a swing.
- To start over, Clear tags in the same bar removes all setup and mistake tags from the selection.
Want the app to handle the obvious part for you? That’s what AutoTags is for.
Let AutoTags do the obvious part
AutoTags suggests tags from your trades’ own data: times, sequence and results. There are two ways to run it:
- One trade: in the Tags tab, click AutoTags. The suggestions appear under the classification; add them one by one or with Add all, and they stay temporary until you click Save changes.
- Many trades: in Trades, click AutoTags in the toolbar. It analyzes the untagged trades in the current view (or the ones you selected) and opens Review AutoTags, with each trade, its suggested tags and the reason. Apply them one by one or with Apply all. Trades that already have tags are skipped, so it never touches what you classified yourself.
It’s limited on purpose. It only suggests what the data can prove:
- Scalp — the trade lasted less than 8 minutes.
- Day Trade — opened and closed the same day, after 8 minutes or more.
- Swing — held overnight.
- Revenge Trading — opened less than 10 minutes after closing a loss.
- Overtrading — 6 or more trades in the same day.
- Late Exit — a losing trade held more than three times your usual hold time, and over an hour.
It won’t suggest a Fair Value Gap or a VWAP bounce: those need your eyes on the chart. And it won’t suggest a tag the data can’t prove — a big loss, for example, doesn’t prove a sizing error. Fewer suggestions, but ones you can trust. Your setups and confluences are still yours to tag.
Nothing is saved until you apply. Applying adds the tags to the ones the trade already has; a new trade style replaces the previous one.
Grade the execution, from 1 to 5
Tags say what happened. A rating says how well you executed it. Open a trade and click the diamonds under the symbol: one click sets the rating, and a click on the same diamond removes it. It saves on its own.
In Trades, the rating shows up as a small ◆ with its number, and the All Ratings filter pulls up, say, every one-diamond trade from last month.
The interesting part comes later, in the numbers: do your best-rated trades actually make the most money? If your 2s pay as well as your 5s, your rating is measuring how a trade felt, not how you executed it.
See what each tag earns
Open the Dashboard and click Analytics at the top. Scroll down to Tag Performance: one row per tag, with trades, win rate, total P&L, expectancy, SQN and profit factor. Rating Performance sits right below it, with one row per rating.
Three things to keep in mind when you read it:
- The Analytics section follows the Dashboard. It now uses the same period and filters as the cards above it, so its numbers match the KPIs you’re looking at. Change the period and the tables follow.
- A trade with three tags counts in three rows. That’s why the rows don’t add up to your total: each row answers “how do trades with this tag perform?”.
- Check the number of trades before the win rate. A tag with 4 trades at 100% says much less than one with 40 trades at 60%.
Want it on your main board? Add the Tag Ranking widget from the Dashboard’s widget catalog.
Test a confluence: Any vs All
Here’s the question tags can finally answer: does a trade get better when your confluences line up?
Open Filters on the Dashboard and pick two or more tags under Setups. A switch appears:
- Any — trades with at least one of the selected tags.
- All — only the trades that carry every one of them.
With All, the whole Dashboard — cards, charts and the Analytics section — shows only the trades where all your selected tags were present. An All setups chip in the active filters reminds you that the filter is on.
In the example account, VWAP Bounce on its own is 41 trades, a 56% win rate and about $81 per trade. Add 4H level and switch to All: 15 trades, 80% and about $236 per trade. That kind of difference tells you which trades deserve your full size, and which ones you can let go.
A simple way to test a confluence:
- Filter by your main tag alone and note the win rate and the expectancy.
- Add the confluence and switch to All.
- Compare. If the combination clearly beats the tag alone and has enough trades behind it, you’ve found a rule worth writing down — that’s a strategy for your Playbook.
- If it doesn’t, the confluence isn’t adding anything. Stop waiting for it.
A 10-minute weekly routine
- Every day: tag each trade before you close the journal — setup, confluences and the mistake, if there was one. Rate the execution.
- Once a week: open Tag Performance for the last few weeks. Find the tag that pays and the one that costs you.
- One test a week: take one confluence and run the Any vs All comparison.
- Once a month: hide the groups you never touched and rename the tags that don’t describe what you actually do.
Tags are the cheapest edge in trading: a few seconds per trade, and your journal stops being a list of results and starts telling you in which conditions you really win.