How to use Vink: from your first trade to your weekly review

Vink is a trading journal built around one idea: your own trades are the best coach you have, but only if you write them down in a form you can actually read later. This guide walks through how to use it, task by task, from setting up your first account to running your weekly review.

You do not have to read it end to end. It follows the order you would naturally use the app in, so stop wherever you have what you need and come back for the rest.

One thing to know up front. Vink has two worlds. The Simple world is two screens with no menu, built for logging a trade in seconds. The Detailed world is the full ticket and every analysis screen. They share the same trades and the same accounts, and you can switch between them whenever you like, so nothing you log in one is trapped there. Most people live in one and dip into the other. We will cover both.

Set up an account first

Before you log anything, tell Vink what you are trading on. Open the Account Manager, rename your account, add your broker, and if it is a prop-firm challenge, mark it as one and enter its rules.

That part matters more than it looks. When you set an account's starting balance, profit target, daily loss limit and maximum drawdown, everything downstream is measured against your account's real rules instead of a generic assumption: how much room you have left, whether a phase passed or failed, the simulation of your edge. Vink models drawdown both ways prop firms do it, static (measured from your starting balance) or trailing (following your account's high-water mark), and you pick which on the account. If you are not sure which your firm uses, it is worth getting right, and we wrote a whole post on how to tell the two apart.

If your trades already live in MetaTrader, you do not have to retype them. You can bulk-import a batch from an MT5 report, and you can even add your accounts by dropping in a screenshot of your MetaTrader Navigator panel.

Set your risk per trade here too. Once Vink knows what one R is worth on this account, it can size positions for you and speak your results in R, the unit that makes trades of different sizes comparable.

Choose your world: Simple or Detailed

Vink can be as light or as thorough as you want, and that choice is the two worlds.

Use the Simple world when the priority is not skipping the entry. It is two screens: a home showing your recent days, and a capture screen that takes a screenshot, a result and a note, and little else. It is built so logging a trade costs seconds, which is the whole battle with journalling, because the entry you skip is always the one that mattered.

Use the Detailed world when you want the full picture: partial targets and the exits you actually got, the worst and best price the trade ran to while you held it, your risk, and every analysis screen. It is the same journal, with more of it on show.

You switch worlds from a control in the sidebar (Detailed) or the header (Simple), and your choice is remembered. A common pattern is to log fast in Simple during the session, then review in Detailed at the weekend.

Log a trade

This is the thing you will do most, so Vink works hardest to make it quick.

The fastest way uses something you already have: your chart. Take a screenshot of your TradingView chart with the position drawn on it, drop it onto the capture screen, and Vink reads the trade off the drawing. It picks up the instrument, the timeframe, the direction, your entry, stop and target, the position size and the risk-to-reward, and fills the ticket in for you. You correct a field if it misread one, and you add the single thing a chart can never know: why you took it.

If you do not trade from a chart screenshot, fill the ticket in by hand, or import a batch from MetaTrader as above.

In the Detailed world the ticket has room for the parts that make a trade worth studying later: partial take-profit targets and the exits you actually got, the maximum favourable and adverse excursion (how far the trade ran your way and against you before it closed), and your risk on the trade. Fill in as much or as little as you want. Everything Vink can work out from what you gave it, it works out for you: the outcome, the R multiple, the R:R, the pips.

Whichever world you use, log the trade the same session, while the reason is still fresh. A trade logged a week later is a trade you are guessing about.

Add the mindset, not just the numbers

The prices are the easy half of a trade to record. The half that actually drives your results early on is what was in your head, and Vink treats it as a first-class part of the trade rather than an afterthought.

On the ticket you can tag the emotion you traded on, note your confidence, and write a line on how you felt. Do it honestly and, after a hundred trades, Vink can show you something no amount of advice can: what your FOMO trades average against your calm ones, in your own numbers.

There is also a Mental Journal, a separate place to record how a whole day went, including days you did not trade at all. A morning intention and an end-of-day debrief are where the patterns that never show up on a single ticket start to surface.

Tag your setups and your mistakes

Tags are how you turn a pile of trades into an answer to the question "which of my setups actually pays, and which mistake keeps costing me?" Label each trade with the setup you were trading and any mistake you made. Later, Vink ranks your setups by what they returned and your mistakes by what they cost. You manage your tag list on the Tags screen, and you can add tags right on the ticket as you log.

Read it back

Logging changes nothing on its own. The point is reading it back, and Vink gives you a few ways in.

The Dashboard is your at-a-glance: your net, the equity curve that produced it, and a P&L calendar of your month.

The Stats screen is where you cut the data. Read every figure in three units, R, cash, or percentage, with one switch, and slice your history by symbol, by day of week, by hour, by tag, by emotion, and by economic news. When you are judging your own decisions rather than your bank balance, leave it on R.

Findings does the reading for you. It scans your own trades and surfaces your recurring leaks, ranked by what each one is costing you, and it keeps the mental findings ("you keep trading angry") apart from the technical ones ("your stops are too tight"). Pin the ones you are working on; dismiss the ones you have handled.

Two more when you want them. Compare puts trades side by side. Simulate runs a Monte Carlo of your edge against your account's own target and drawdown, so you can see the range of outcomes your current numbers actually imply, not just the average.

Run the loop: review and act

The move that turns all of this into a different result is the weekly review, and acting on exactly one thing.

Open Review and write one for the week or the month. It pulls your figures and your trades for the period, you reflect, and it carries one focus forward into the next week, so you work on a single leak at a time instead of trying to fix five at once. Turn on review reminders in Settings so the review actually happens.

For the day-to-day, set a daily loss limit, in cash or in R. When the day has gone far enough, Vink nudges you. Be clear-eyed about what that is: it is a nudge, not a guardrail. It cannot stop your broker, and it does not pretend to. That part is still you.

Going further

Once the loop is running, a few more tools are worth knowing about.

• Rotations, if you trade several prop accounts. Vink tracks whose turn it is, so "log a trade, then move to the next account" is answerable. Set it up in the Account Manager.
• The News Calendar shows the high-impact releases for the pairs you trade, so you can see what is due before you take the trade.
• Accountability lets you give someone you trust a read-only view of your dashboard. You choose exactly what they see, and they have to accept the invite.
• The Portfolio tracker is a separate section for your holdings, with one-click price fetching, if you want your net worth in the same place.
• Hide amounts blurs the cash across the whole app when you are on a shared screen, and leaves your R and percentages readable.

Make it a habit

None of this works if the logging does not happen, so keep the bar low. Log every trade the same day, in whichever world is faster for you that day. Read it back once a week. Take one thing into the next week and check whether it moved.

That loop, log then read then change one thing, is the whole method. Everything else in Vink exists to make one of those three steps easier, or more honest.

Ready to start? Create an account, set up your first trading account, and log your next trade before you close the chart. If you are still finding your feet with journalling itself, start with how to keep a trading journal and come back. Vink is free while it is in beta.