How to Record TradingView Trades (Without OBS or a Second Monitor)

If you trade off TradingView and post your trades to X, Instagram, or TikTok, you already know the problem: the best trades happen when you least expect them, and by the time you remember to hit record, the setup is half over. This guide covers every practical way to record your TradingView trades — from manual screen recorders to a fully automatic setup that captures every trade for you.

Why recording every trade is harder than it sounds

In theory, recording your trades is simple: open a screen recorder, hit start, trade, hit stop. In practice, most traders lose 80% of their best clips to one of a few failure modes:

• Forgetting to start recording before the setup triggers — by the time you notice the trade, it's already in profit and the entry is gone.
• Recording everything, all day, and ending up with 6 hours of footage to scrub through for the 90 seconds that actually matter.
• Manual tools (OBS, QuickTime, Loom) that require you to name, trim, and export the file before you can post it — by which point the trade is old news.
• Forgetting to stop recording, filling your disk with multi-hour files that crash your editor when you try to open them.

None of these are a discipline problem. They're a tooling problem — you're trying to manually operate a recorder while also trading, which means recording always loses.

Option 1: Manual screen recording with OBS

OBS Studio is free and powerful, which is exactly why most traders give up on it. Setting up a recording-only scene, picking the right capture source for your TradingView window, configuring an encoder that won't tank your frame rate mid-trade, and remembering hotkeys to start/stop is a lot of setup for something you want to be invisible.

OBS works well if you're recording a single planned session — a YouTube stream, a webinar, a one-off breakdown. It works poorly as a daily habit, because the friction of opening OBS, checking the scene, and hitting record is exactly the friction that makes you skip it on your best trading days.

Option 2: Built-in OS screen recording

macOS's Screenshot app (Cmd+Shift+5) and Windows' Xbox Game Bar (Win+G) both do a basic job of recording your screen. They're fine for a single clip you plan in advance, but they share the same core issue as OBS: you have to remember to start and stop them, and the resulting file is a raw, uncropped, uncaptioned recording of your whole desktop — not something you can post as-is.

Option 3: Automatic recording that starts and stops with your trades

The alternative is to stop treating recording as a manual action and instead tie it to something that already happens automatically: your trades. TradeCut watches your TradingView chart during the trading hours you set, and the moment a position opens, it starts recording — no hotkey, no OBS scene to remember, no "oh no, was I recording?" panic.

When the position closes, TradeCut stops recording and turns the raw footage into a clip scoped to just that trade — entry to exit, nothing before, nothing after. Every trade you take during your session becomes its own file in a library, whether it was a 30-second scalp or a 40-minute swing.

1. Set your trading hours once (e.g. 9:30am–11am ET) so TradeCut only arms itself when you're actually at the desk.
2. Trade normally on TradingView — TradeCut watches for position open/close in the background.
3. Every closed trade appears in your library as a trimmed, ready clip within seconds of the trade closing.

What actually matters once you're recording

Recording the trade is only step one. If you plan to post your trades, three things separate a clip people actually watch from one they scroll past:

• Tight trimming — start right before entry, end right after exit. Dead air kills watch time on every platform.
• A caption that states the setup in one line (symbol, side, and result) so viewers don't have to read your chart to understand what happened.
• The right aspect ratio for where you're posting — 9:16 for TikTok/Reels/Shorts, 1:1 or 16:9 for X, depending on your audience.

This is exactly the gap between "a recording of a trade" and "a clip ready to post," and it's where most traders lose the most time — 20-30 minutes per trade in an editor, cropping and trimming footage that's already gone stale by the time it's exported.

A simple recording checklist for day traders

• Set a fixed trading-hours window so your recorder only runs when you're actually trading.
• Record trade-by-trade, not session-by-session — one file per trade is far easier to review and post than a multi-hour recording.
• Auto-trim to entry→exit so you're not scrubbing footage to find the part worth posting.
• Keep a running library of every trade, win or lose — your loss recaps often perform just as well as your wins.
• Export in the aspect ratio your audience actually watches in.

Once recording is automatic, the bigger question becomes what to actually post with it — see our guide to running a faceless trading account for post ideas and a routine that doesn't require showing your face.