Lucid Terminal is a background trade journal + indicator engine + bot cockpit. You install it once, sign in with your email + password, connect a broker, and every trade you take from that point forward gets journaled automatically — even when the app is closed, as long as it’s running quietly in the tray.
Two things: download, then create your account with email + password. You only do this once per machine.
Go to lucidterminal.io/download and click the big Download button. You’ll get a file called Lucid-Terminal-Setup-1.0.0-beta.XX.exe (~81 MB). Windows only for now — macOS and Linux builds ship at v1.0.
Double-click the installer. Windows SmartScreen may say “Unknown publisher” during beta — click More info → Run anyway. (We’re ordering an Extended Validation code-signing certificate so that warning disappears on v1.0.)
Sign up at the app with your email + password, click the verification link we email you, then sign in — no activation key needed.
Open the Broker Connections tab. Pick your personal or prop firm account from the list, then enter the API credentials your firm gave you. For ProjectX-tenant firms that’s a userName + apiKey pair. For Tradovate direct it’s your normal trader login.
Within 5 seconds of saving, your account balance, open positions, and recent fills appear in the dashboard. That’s live data over each firm’s official API — no scraping, no browser automation, fully sanctioned.
Three things run in the background. You don’t need to babysit any of them.
Every 5 seconds, Lucid Terminal asks each connected broker: "What’s my balance? What positions are open? What fills happened since last check?" Responses are cached and fed to every other system. This is why the app doesn’t need to be in the foreground — as long as it’s running in the tray, data keeps flowing.
On every new bar of ES / NQ / MNQ / MES (and whichever others you enable), the engine recomputes EMA, VWAP, RSI, and any custom indicators you’ve uploaded. Those readings get attached to every trade that fires.
Every fill becomes three things: (a) a row in local SQLite the app queries, (b) an anonymized contribution to the data pool that refines the curated strategy library, (c) — if you’ve wired it — a full markdown note in your Obsidian vault with every indicator reading at entry + exit.
Close the window, the app keeps running. You’ll see the Lucid Terminal icon near your clock. Double-click it to reopen. Only actually quit from File → Exit if you want to pause data collection — otherwise leave it running so no trade goes unlogged.
You don’t need Obsidian. Your trade data is still collected, journaled to the data pool, and available through Lucid’s own analytics tabs. But if you want the full experience — searchable markdown for every trade, weekly performance digests, strategy pages that update themselves — wire Obsidian.
Go to obsidian.md/download and grab the Windows installer. It’s free and works entirely offline.
Open Obsidian → Create new vault. Name it Obsidian Vault (or whatever you like) and save it somewhere you’ll remember — OneDrive, iCloud, local Documents folder, any sync provider is fine.
Recommended location (matches our default): C:\Users\YourName\OneDrive\Documents\Obsidian Vault
In Lucid Terminal, open Settings → Obsidian Integration. Click Browse and pick your vault folder. Lucid Terminal will create these subfolders automatically (won’t touch anything else):
Two reasons, and they’re the same reason in different forms.
Most trading journals are black boxes. You paste trades in, see some charts, and the company owns the structured data. When you cancel, that data either dies with the subscription or gets exported as a CSV that’s useless without their product.
Lucid Terminal inverts that. The markdown vault is yours. Every trade note, every indicator reading, every strategy page lives in plain text files you own forever. Cancel tomorrow — the vault stays. Use it with Obsidian, Logseq, or just plain Notepad. We’re not a data hostage-taker. We’re the engine that generates the data for your brain.
Your individual trade data feeds your personal vault and your personal backtest engine. Every fill, every indicator reading, every setup performance metric flows into Lucid’s backtest engine for your account — so the strategies you build keep refining themselves against your actual trading history.
You benefit twice: you get a strategy page in your vault that says “this setup hit 68% for you specifically,” AND Lucid’s recommendation engine uses your history to surface parameter tweaks tailored to your personal trading patterns. It’s why active long-term users get the most out of the platform — the longer you stay, the deeper your personal archive and the sharper your personal edge.
(Paid tiers can opt out of data-pool contribution anytime in Settings. Free tier contribution is how the free tier stays free, disclosed in TOS. CCPA-compliant deletion within the 90-day identifiable window — email privacy@lucidterminal.io.)
Once you’ve connected a broker, the Bots tab is your control room. Every bot in the catalog has been validated by our team across years of market data and classified into one of three promotion tracks. You decide which ones to paper-trade on your account, which to promote to live, and what risk caps each deployment carries.
Going to a paid Topstep eval? Read the complete eval deployment runbook — covers the 4-stage workflow (paper → pre-flight → eval → funded) with a printable pre-flight checklist before each $50–150 attempt.
Open Bots → Premium Creation. You’ll see three columns:
Each row carries a 50K or 150K tag based on its drawdown. The 50K tag means the bot survives a Topstep 50K combine ($2,500 max loss). The 150K tag means it needs a 150K combine ($4,500 max loss) and would blow a 50K. Click ▼ Stats on any row for full per-strategy breakdown.
Click Deploy on any bot. The deploy modal lets you:
Every new deployment starts in PAPER mode. The engine simulates fills against live market data so you can watch how the bot performs on your specific account size + session schedule before risking real money. Paper P&L appears immediately on the deployment card and updates with every simulated fill.
The top of the Premium Creation tab shows every deployment you’ve created with live trade count, win rate, P&L, and current drawdown. Each card has:
When a paper deployment has produced enough trades to convince you the bot performs as backtested on YOUR specific account, click LIVE. A high-friction confirmation modal opens that requires you to:
Once promoted, the engine routes real fills to your broker on the next signal. The promotion is recorded in the audit log with timestamp, IP, and full snapshot of risk caps at the moment of promotion (compliance trail in case of post-mortem). To revert, click ↩ Paper on any LIVE deployment to demote it back.
Open Bots → Tuning Feed to see the nightly bot-tuning pipeline’s decisions across every catalog bot. Each entry shows:
You approve / reject from this feed; nothing auto-applies to your live bots without your sign-off. When the candidate beats baseline by ≥ 5% over its evaluation window, you’ll see it recommended for promotion. When it underperforms, the paper-trader auto-rollbacks and you see the rollback reason inline.
Download the beta. Create your account. Connect a broker. Come back in a week and you’ll already have a searchable archive of every setup you took — with every indicator reading at entry and exit.
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