Trade the trend.
Follow the rules.
Most traders don't lose because they lack predictions — they lose because rules are hard to follow when money is moving. Trendkept turns your written trend-following rules into software: sized by risk, stop-loss sent with every entry, scored honestly in R-multiples.
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The free toolkit is for traders comfortable with a terminal (Python + GitHub — get it here). Pro, coming soon, is one-click for everyone else — the weekly email is where we'll announce it.
| Symbol | Close | What the rules say |
|---|---|---|
| NVDA | 211.35 | LONG entry — pullback · stop 190.19 |
| V | 356.73 | in an uptrend — no entry today |
| AAPL | 314.95 | trend broken |
Most rows, most days, say "not today" — the rules trade rarely, on purpose.
Most days, the answer is "do nothing." That's the discipline part. The board from Friday 18 July 2026 — what the rules said, ticker by ticker. Descriptions of data, not advice.
How it works
Three parts. One loop.
The software carries the hard
part.
Describe how you trade in plain English — "My Trading Diagram." Averages, entries, risk per trade. Every scan, chart and backtest runs your ruleset, not ours.
Daily scans say exactly what the rules say — including "do nothing," the most common right answer. Entries go to your broker with the stop-loss attached in the same order.
Every completed trade is scored in R-multiples straight from your broker's records — profit measured against planned risk. You can't fool a journal that fills itself in.
Why switch
Not another journal.
Not another broker order.
Edgewonk, TraderSync, Tradervue — good tools that score your discipline after the fact. By the time the journal sees the trade, the damage is already sized, entered and un-stopped.
A bracket enforces one static stop on a trade you already chose. It won't tell you whether the trend qualifies, size the position off your risk, or trail the stop as the structure moves.
It structures the trade before it exists — trend qualification, risk-based sizing, stop attached to the entry — then trails the stop daily and scores adherence after. One ruleset, enforced end to end.
The system
The five rules (free forever — the whole point is following them)
- Trade only a confirmed uptrend.
Price above the 50- and 200-day averages, averages aligned, higher highs and lows. Otherwise: stay out. No exceptions.
- Enter without chasing.
A pullback that resumes, or a breakout — never a move that's already run far.
- The stop goes in with the order.
Just below the last swing low, enforced by your broker — decided before the trade, not during the drawdown.
- Size by risk, not by gut.
If the stop is hit, lose no more than 1–2% of the account. The formula has no conviction knob.
- Let winners run; cut the break.
Trail the stop up under each higher low. Exit completely when the trend breaks.
Free tools
Calculators — no sign-up, no catch
The maths behind the rules, as four little tools you can use right now. They're a taste of what Trendkept automates on every trade.
How many shares to buy so a loss costs no more than you decided. The flagship.
Risk per trade calculatorWhat 0.5%, 1% or 2% of your account is per trade — the 1% rule, in pounds.
R-multiple calculatorScore a trade in R — profit measured in units of what you risked.
Stop-loss calculatorHow far your stop sits and exactly how much money is on the line.
Receipts
Proof, not promises
Two kinds of evidence, both public: backtests that refuse to cheat, and the rules trading a real paper account in the open — wins, losses and boring days on the record.
We show you this to demonstrate what an honest backtest refuses to do: it can't peek at the future (a signal at bar i uses only data up to bar i), it puts the drawdown on the same line as the return, and it labels its own fills as idealized. Backtests that peek look brilliant and trade terribly. Run it yourself on any symbol — the number that comes out is yours, not our marketing.
$ python -m trendkept.cli backtest --symbol AAPL --account 1000 --risk 0.02
Starting equity : 1,000.00
Ending equity : 1,252.00 <- one bundled sample, not a promise
Max drawdown : -2.28% <- shown as prominently as the gain
Expectancy : +7.13R/trade <- idealized fills; reality slipsPast and backtested performance do not predict future results — which is why the strategy reacts to trends instead of predicting them.
- The rules fly a paper account nightly. Every trading day the exact ruleset on this page manages a practice-money account — stops trailed, entries taken, most days sat out — and publishes every action to the open project log.
- First trades, honestly scored. The first completed trade lost 0.44R — logged, published, and smaller than the planned risk. That's the system working.
- The Trend Check #1 shipped. The weekly email now writes itself from the same engine and goes out every Sunday.
- Open-source core released — the full engine, dashboard, backtester and journal, MIT-licensed, zero dependencies.
Pricing
Free core. Pro when it's earned.
The toolkit is free forever. Pro arrives only after our public validation period — we'd rather earn the right to charge.
- The full rules engine & dashboard
- Honest backtesting (daily to 1-minute bars)
- Watchlist scans & paper trading
- Broker stop management & trade journal
- One-click install & updates — no terminal, ever
- Licensed market data (no scraped feeds)
- Daily "what the rules say" email on your watchlist
- Journal insights & discipline scoring
The weekly
The Trend Check — free, every Sunday
The engine's verdict on 20 well-known tickers — in an uptrend, nothing confirmed, or trend broken — plus one honest lesson in risk. Written like a person, not a terminal. No predictions, no hype, unsubscribe anytime.
One quick step: we'll email you a confirmation link — click it and you're in (check spam if it's shy). Unsubscribe anytime; your address is never shared.
Fair questions
Asked and answered — honestly
Does Trendkept predict which way a market will go?
No — and we'd be suspicious of anyone who says they can. Trendkept reacts: it identifies confirmed trends, defines entries and stop-losses in advance, caps every loss by position sizing, and lets winners run. The edge is behaviour, not prophecy.
Do I need a broker account to use it?
No. Scanning, charts, backtesting and the watchlist work out of the box with free public data. If you want it to place paper trades and fill in the journal automatically, connect a free Alpaca paper account (10 minutes, no deposit) — your API keys stay on your machine.
Is my money or data ever in Trendkept's hands?
Never. The software runs on your computer; broker keys never leave it; we can't touch your account and don't want to. Trendkept is analysis and education software, not a broker and not an advisor.
What does it cost?
The core toolkit is free and open source, forever. Pro (the effortless version — one-click install, licensed data, journal insights) will be £12/month when it launches, and the waiting list gets the founding price of £79/year, locked for life.
How is this different from Edgewonk, TraderSync or Tradervue?
Those are journals — genuinely useful, and they prove people pay for discipline. But a journal can only score a trade after it happened. Trendkept works before and during as well: it qualifies the trend, sizes the position off your risk, sends the stop-loss with the entry, trails it daily — and then journals the result. If a journal is a mirror, Trendkept is a seatbelt that also keeps the mirror.
It's open source — can't someone just run it free and never pay?
Yes, and we hope they do — that's the point of the free core. Pro is for people who'd rather not maintain software: one-click install and updates, licensed clean data, insights, support. You pay for the effortless version, not for secrets. (Every serious open-core company works this way.)
Will following these rules make me money?
Honestly: nobody can promise that, and we won't. What the rules do is cap what any single mistake can cost and keep you out of most bad trades. Our backtests are public and refuse to peek at the future; our paper account trades in the open, losses included. Read both and judge for yourself.
Make it yours — saved in your browser only. The same personalisation runs through the whole Trendkept dashboard.