The stop you wrote versus the stop that filled
Two prices tell a story that one price hides. Slippage, dragged stops, and the no-stop trade.
A broker tradebook shows one exit price. It cannot tell you whether that exit was the stop you planned, a stop you dragged, or a stop you never placed.
Add a second field and the whole review changes.
Plot planned against filled
On a scatter with planned exit on one axis and actual exit on the other, well-behaved trades hug the diagonal. Points that drift away from it are your slippage, your freezes, and your negotiations with yourself.
One quarter of data is usually enough to see whether the drift is random or always in the same direction.
The four points far below the line are the dragged stops. Illustrative journal data, not a live book and not a performance claim.
A missing stop is data too
Time-based exits, "I will check at 2pm", and pure hope all look identical in a CSV: an ordinary sell. A single no-stop checkbox lets you group them later and see what that habit costs in aggregate.
This is not a lecture about always using stops. Plenty of profitable books use time or structure instead. The point is that you can only study a decision you recorded.
Say which language the stop was in
On options this matters more than people admit. A 20-point index stop and a ₹20 premium stop are different instructions that happen to share a number.
On spreads, the stop belongs to the structure, not to one accidental leg.
Stop honoured
- Planned −₹3,000
- Filled −₹3,200
- Slippage ₹200, market was thin
- Rule intact
Stop dragged
- Planned −₹3,000
- Filled −₹9,200
- No new information, just hope
- Rule broken, flag it
Key takeaways
- Store planned stop and filled exit as two separate fields.
- Flag trades that never had a stop instead of letting them blend in.
- Say whether the stop was in premium or in underlying points.
Not advice, not a call. NiyataBook is a personal trading journal, not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst. Everything above looks backwards at trades that already closed. What happened in a book does not promise what happens next, and F&O can take a year’s savings in a week.