Dalal Journal started as a spreadsheet for one NIFTY and SENSEX options trader, and grew into the tool he wished existed.
Most trading journals are built for US equities and bolted on an F&O tab afterwards. They tell you what went wrong after the close, and stop there.
The problem for an Indian index-options trader is rarely the setup. It is the one red day where the loss limit gets ignored. Going back over one real account of 1,023 trades across 99 sessions, the daily cap was breached on 18 days — and those days alone cost ₹36.7 lakh. Enforcing the limit the trader had already written down would have turned a ₹6.6 lakh year into ₹26.6 lakh.
That is the whole thesis. Analytics are easy. Interrupting yourself is hard, and it is worth more than every chart on the screen.
Made in India, for NSE and BSE index options — NIFTY, BANKNIFTY, FINNIFTY, MIDCPNIFTY, SENSEX and BANKEX. Weekly expiries, intraday holding periods, and the brokers Indian retail traders actually use.
“One rule you already wrote down, actually enforced, was worth more than every strategy in the app combined.”
— from the analysis that started this