# Build a trading journal

> Sync closed trades read-only with investor passwords, incrementally and without gaps.

Source: https://tickwire.io/docs/guides/journal/

A journal needs complete, correct history and should never be able to trade.

## Use investor passwords

Connect accounts with the **investor** (read-only) password. The terminal then can't trade at all:
account information shows `tradeAllowed: false`, and health shows `read_only: true` and
`trading_enabled: false`. Your users can hand you access without handing you their account.

## First sync

Page through deals by time. Start is inclusive, end exclusive, and `limit` is at most 1000:

```bash
curl -s "$TW/users/current/accounts/$ID/history-deals/time/2026-01-01T00:00:00Z/2026-09-23T00:00:00Z?offset=0&limit=1000" \
  -H "auth-token: $TW_KEY"
```

Keep increasing `offset` by the number of results until you get fewer than `limit`.

Deals include deposits, withdrawals and credit (`DEAL_TYPE_BALANCE`, `DEAL_TYPE_CREDIT`), so you can
separate trading performance from money movements. On MT4, closed orders are presented as deals
with the same fields.

## Stay in sync

Either poll from your last deal's `time` (overlap by a minute and de-duplicate on deal `id`), or
subscribe to the account stream with `sync.startingHistoryTime` set to that time and consume
`deals` and `dealAdded` frames.

## Get the time right

Group trades into days by the broker's trading day, using `brokerTime`, not by UTC date. See
[Time zones](https://tickwire.io/docs/time-zones/).

## Statistics

If you'd rather not compute them, our statistics API (not available yet) returns
period stats, drawdown, and equity and balance curves.