Reading a decision record

Every few seconds the engine wakes up, looks at each symbol each of your strategies cares about, and decides. Almost always the decision is no. Each of those is written down anyway.

That sounds like a lot of records for nothing much, and it is. It’s also the only way to answer the question people actually ask, which is never “what did it do” but “why didn’t it do the thing I expected?”

The two ids

Records carry two different identifiers and confusing them is the classic mistake.

• The tick id groups everything evaluated in the same pass. Every strategy, every symbol, one moment in time. Useful for “what did the whole system think at 10:42?”
• The trade id groups everything belonging to one trade — the entry decision, the order, the fill, the stop, the exit, days later.

The second is the one you want when following a story. “What happened with that XYZ position” is a trade, not a tick.

What a record contains

Roughly: which strategy, which symbol, what the rule’s inputs were at that moment, what it evaluated to, whether a language model was consulted and what it said, and what happened next — nothing, a proposal awaiting your approval, or an order.

The valuable field is usually the one saying why not. A signal that fired but produced no trade because there was no capital free looks, from the outside, identical to a strategy that never fired at all. The record is what tells the two apart, and they call for opposite responses: one wants more allocation, the other wants a better rule.

When to actually read one

Not routinely. Three situations:

• “Why didn’t it buy?” Find the tick, read the rule’s inputs. Usually the answer is dull and immediately obvious.
• “Why did it sell there?” Exits have a source — your rule, a protective stop, an end-of-day flatten, or you. Knowing which one changes what you’d fix.
• “Is it doing what I think it’s doing?” Reading a handful of records after writing a new rule is the fastest way to find out that it doesn’t mean what you meant.

On the Review screen, each trade opens into its chain, which is these records in order.