FEATURE / 04 · SETUPS

Stop guessing which of your strategies actually work.

A setup is a label for the strategy you used on a trade. Tag every trade with one. A few weeks later, the data tells you which setups make money and which ones to stop trading.

Setup performance Q1 5 setups · 171 trades
Pullback to EMA
47 trades · 64% win
+$4,280
Opening Range Break
38 trades · 58% win
+$2,960
Failed Break
29 trades · 55% win
+$1,840
Gap Fill
22 trades · 41% win
-$640
Trend Continuation
35 trades · 60% win
+$3,120

Why setups, and not just notes

Most traders run three to seven strategies — breakouts, pullbacks, failed breaks, opening ranges, gap fills. Without tagging which strategy you used on each trade, you're guessing at which ones work. Setups turn that guessing into data.

After a couple weeks of consistent tagging, setup analysis shows the win rate, P&L, profit factor, and average R per setup. Often you find the strategy you thought was your bread and butter is actually breakeven, and a quieter setup is doing all the work.

How tagging works

01

Create your setups once

Management → Setups. Add the 3–7 strategies you actually trade. Short, descriptive names. You can always add more later as you find new patterns.

02

Assign during your daily review

Open the calendar, click into the trading day, click each trade, pick the setup from a dropdown. A few seconds per trade.

03

Read the analytics

After 30+ trades per setup the patterns get statistically real. Win rate, profit factor, P&L, average R per setup — the ones that should keep getting traded and the ones that shouldn't.

One setup per trade on purpose

Each trade gets exactly one setup — the primary strategy you used for that entry. Multiple setups per trade would muddy the data; setup-level analytics only mean something if each trade is attributed to one strategy.

The way you describe other context — market state, execution quality, mistakes — lives in tags, where you can apply many.

Start with three to five setups. A 30-tag taxonomy on day one feels like a chore and you'll quietly stop tagging. Add more as you find them.

Try it on your trades.

14 days free. No card required. Connect NinjaTrader and you're looking at your real numbers in under five minutes.