Most automated traders never review individual trades after they close. Trade Replay changes that. Here is what to look for and why it matters for your edge.
Most automated traders check their P&L at the end of the day and move on. If the number is positive, the bot worked. If it is negative, they wonder what happened.
That approach compounds losses. Without reviewing how individual trades actually played out, bar by bar, there is no systematic way to know whether your strategy is working as designed or just getting lucky.
Trade Replay in Relay is built for exactly this kind of review. Here is what it shows you and why it should be part of your regular workflow.
What Trade Replay actually shows you
When you pull up a trade in Relay and ask for a replay, you get a bar-by-bar price path timeline for that trade from entry to exit. The replay surfaces four key data points:
Entry: The exact price and bar at which your position was opened, and whether it matched your strategy's intent.
Peak move (MFE): The maximum favorable excursion. How far the trade moved in your favor before reversing. This is the ceiling of what the trade could have returned if your exit had been better timed.
Worst drawdown (MAE): The maximum adverse excursion. How far the trade moved against you at its worst point before recovering (or not). This tells you how much heat you took on every trade.
Reversal start: Where the trade began moving against the position, regardless of when you exited.
Exit: The actual close price versus where the reversal started and where MFE was.
Why this matters more than you think
The gap between MFE and your actual exit is money left on the table. The gap between MAE and your stop placement tells you whether your stops are too tight, too loose, or well-calibrated.
When you look at those gaps across 20 or 30 trades, patterns emerge. You might find that your entries are strong but your exits are consistently early, cutting winners short. Or that your MAE is high on losing trades but your stop was never hit because you exited manually at the worst moment.
These are systematic problems. They do not show up in a P&L summary. They show up in trade replays.
How to use Trade Replay in your workflow
The most effective approach is to review a sample of trades after each week: a few winners, a few losers, and a few that were roughly flat. Ask Relay to replay each one and look for:
On winners: How close was your exit to the MFE? If you are consistently exiting at 40% of MFE, your exit logic may be cutting runs short.
On losers: How far did the trade move against you before you exited? If MAE on losing trades is much higher than your stop distance, you may be manually overriding stop losses.
On flat trades: Where was the reversal start relative to entry? Flat trades with strong MFE readings are often entries that moved in your direction but gave it all back before your exit triggered. That is a signal problem, not a position sizing problem.
The question Trade Replay helps you answer
Post-trade review sounds obvious. Most traders skip it because they do not have a structured way to do it and because looking at losing trades in detail is uncomfortable.
Trade Replay removes the friction. Instead of pulling up charts manually and trying to remember what happened, you can ask Relay to walk you through a specific trade, then ask it to compare that trade's profile to your average winner or your average loser.
The traders who compound their results over time are the ones who treat each trade as data. Trade Replay is the tool that makes that practice systematic rather than aspirational.
Trade Replay is available in Relay for all closed positions. Open Relay in your RelayDesk dashboard and select any completed trade to get started.
