Apps are tools built by other StaxInvesting members and offered in the Marketplace, alongside strategies, markets and indicators. They open inside your portal — there is nothing to download, nothing to install, and no second password to remember.
The first one is StratTrax, built by BanjoJunkie. It charts and analyses the alert history and your own trade history you already have here, so you can dig into what actually happened on a strategy rather than reading it off a table.
Note
An app is written by another member, not by StaxInvesting. We decide which apps are allowed in and what they're permitted to see, but the app itself is somebody else's work — the same way a strategy on the Marketplace is somebody else's trading.
Finding an app
Open the Marketplace from the left-hand menu and scroll to the Apps section. Each app shows its name, who built it, a short description and the price — which may be a monthly figure or simply Free, because the publisher decides what to charge and some choose to charge nothing.
Click anywhere on the app — the whole card, or the whole row in List view — to open its own page, where you'll find the full description, the price, and what the app is able to see. That page is worth reading before you subscribe.
Subscribing
How this goes depends on whether the app costs anything, and the button tells you which you're about to get.
A free app. The button reads Subscribe · Free on the app's own page, and plain Subscribe on the Marketplace row. Click it, confirm, and that's the whole thing — no checkout window, no PayPal, no card details, and nothing to cancel later. A link to the app appears in your left-hand menu.
A paid app. Click Subscribe and a checkout window opens. Tick the box agreeing to the Terms of Service, the End User License Agreement and the Privacy Policy, then click the PayPal button and finish in PayPal's own window. Once the payment goes through, the link appears in your menu.
Either way, click that link and the app opens, filling the page.
Tip
If the link hasn't appeared yet, give it about a minute and reload the page. Access is switched on a moment after you subscribe, not instantly.
Example
StratTrax is free at the moment. You open the Marketplace, click Subscribe on its row, confirm, and StratTrax appears in your menu under your trading pages — no payment step at all, and no monthly charge.
Example
A paid app at $10/mo works the other way. You subscribe on Tuesday the 9th, PayPal confirms, and the app appears in your menu. You're billed $10 again on the 9th of each month until you cancel. Your first month is not free — the free-month offer covers marketplace strategies only.
Note
A publisher can change their price later. If an app you're using free is given a price, that doesn't start charging you — your access carries on as it is, and a price only ever applies to someone subscribing from then on.
Using an app
Click the app's name in the left-hand menu. It opens as a full page inside the portal — you stay signed in, and you stay on the same site. Nothing opens in a new tab.
If the app is slow to appear, or shows "App unavailable", that's the publisher's end rather than yours. Try again shortly; if it keeps happening, let us know which app and roughly when.
What an app can and can't see
This is the part worth being clear about, because you're letting somebody else's software look at your trading.
An app can:
- Read the alert history for the strategies available to you — entries, exits, prices and times.
- Read your own trade history and your reports, so it can chart your results.
- Save its own settings for you, so your layout and preferences are still there next time.
An app cannot:
- Place, change or close a trade. Apps have no route to your bot or your broker at all.
- Change any of your settings — position size, stops, trading hours, none of it.
- See your broker account details.
- See your license key, your email address or your name. The app is given an ID that identifies you to that one app only and means nothing anywhere else — not even to a second app by the same publisher.
Warning
An app can read your trading history, and that history is genuinely yours. If you would rather a third party didn't see what you have traded, don't subscribe — and that applies just as much to a free app, where there's no charge to weigh it against. If you change your mind later, cancelling cuts off its access: immediately on a free app, and at the end of the period you've paid for on a paid one.
Cancelling
You can cancel in three places, and they all do the same thing:
- Unsubscribe on the app's row in the Marketplace — the same red button a strategy you subscribe to has.
- Cancel subscription, or Give up access on a free app, on the app's own page.
- Your Billing page, where every subscription you pay for is listed together. A free app isn't listed here, because there's no billing to show.
On a paid app you keep access until the end of the month you've already paid for. After that the link disappears from your menu and the app can no longer read anything of yours.
On a free app there's nothing to stop billing, so unsubscribing hands the access back there and then — the link goes from your menu immediately.
Either way, anything the app had saved for you is kept, so if you subscribe again later you are not starting from scratch.
Changing your mind, either way
An app is never stuck. The button on its Marketplace row is always one of two things — Unsubscribe while you have it, Subscribe while you don't — and you can go back and forth as often as you like, exactly like a strategy.
On a paid app there are two steps to letting one go, and you only have to take the first:
- Unsubscribe stops the billing. You are not charged again, and you keep the app for the rest of the month you already paid for.
- If you'd rather not keep it for the rest of that month, click Unsubscribe a second time. That hands the access back straight away and puts the app back on sale for you. There is no refund for the remainder — you're choosing to finish early — and the app tells you so before it does anything.
On a free app there's only ever one step: Unsubscribe hands the access back immediately, since there was never any billing to stop first.
Resubscribing is the normal Subscribe button at the current price. If you hand the access back early, that button is there the moment you do.
Example
StratTrax is free, so you click Subscribe, confirm, and it's in your menu. In March you decide you're not using it and click Unsubscribe — the link vanishes that minute and the row goes back to saying Subscribe. In December you want it back: click Subscribe again, and your old charts are all still there.
Example
A paid app at $10/mo takes the two-step route. You subscribe on the 9th. On the 20th you click Unsubscribe — no further charges, and you keep it until the 9th of next month. On the 22nd you'd rather it was gone, so you click Unsubscribe again; the link vanishes that minute.
Note
Cancelling an app has no effect on your automation, your strategies or any other subscription. It's a self-contained thing — the app goes away and everything else carries on exactly as before.
If the publisher closes the app to new members
A publisher can pause new subscriptions — the button on their listing reads Closed to new members and won't respond.
That only affects people trying to join. If you're already subscribed, nothing changes: you keep your access, and if you're paying for it you keep being billed as normal.