// the take
TradeNote is a self-hosted trading journal: traders import executed trades (via CSV from brokers) and get a dashboard, calendar heatmap, and diary/playbook views to review performance patterns. It's aimed at retail day/swing traders who want to keep trade history on their own infrastructure instead of a SaaS journal, and are comfortable running Docker containers.
Fully self-hosted with a one-command docker-compose setup, which is the actual selling point for anyone wary of handing trade history to a third-party SaaS. The Vue 3 frontend is organized into clear feature views (Calendar, Playbook, Diary, Screenshots) rather than one monolithic dashboard. Backend auth and data model are handled by Parse Server (APP_ID/MASTER_KEY pattern) instead of hand-rolled auth, which saves a lot of boilerplate security work.
Trade import is CSV-based per broker with hand-maintained conversion scripts in brokers/, so there's no live broker API sync — every trade update is a manual export/import round trip, which doesn't scale past casual personal use. The project is run by a single 'recreational developer' with an explicit packed-schedule disclaimer, and the last push was over a year ago, so bug fixes and new broker format support are not guaranteed. MongoDB plus Parse Server is a heavier, less common stack to operate than Postgres for a journal of this size, and there's a Checkout/CheckoutSuccess flow in the source suggesting paid functionality is interleaved with the open-source codebase, which is worth checking before assuming full feature parity on the free self-hosted version.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →