Cookbooks & Recipes: Run Reports and Edit Them with AI
Run official Recipes on any session, then use TradingFlow AI to fork, refine, review, and save a private report of your own.
Option Trades shows you the tape. Rank shows you a leaderboard. Cookbooks is the third way to work with the same underlying data: a library of pre-built reports that walk you through a question step by step, with the charts and tables already assembled — so you can read the evidence instead of building the query yourself.
What a cookbook is
A cookbook (TradingFlow also calls it a recipe) is a report made of ordinary building blocks — short explanations, KPI numbers, tables, and charts — bound to real queries against TradingFlow's flow and chain data. Nothing is pre-written commentary baked in ahead of time: every time you open one, it resolves fresh against a real trading session. Two kinds of report live in the same library:
- Official templates — built and maintained by the TradingFlow team, covering a fixed, well-scoped question (for example, "what did today's flow look like across the market?").
- My recipes — your private, owner-only reports, forked from an official template or started from scratch. Creating and editing recipes has a separate, limited rollout, so a paid account may have the official library without the authoring controls.
Open the library any time at Cookbooks.
The Cookbooks gallery. The official template library is what every paid account can open today.
A cookbook is not a trade signal. Every official template is explicit that the pattern it surfaces is descriptive, not proof of who traded, why, or what happens next. Treat a cookbook the same way you'd treat any other TradingFlow evidence: a starting point for research, not a conclusion.
Choose the right official recipe
The official catalog grows as new research jobs are added, so this guide does not freeze a template count or duplicate the whole inventory. Use the Recipes directory for the current catalog. Each page explains the job, the evidence it uses, its interpretation limits, and opens the exact recipe in the app.
Choose by the question you need answered:
- Quick lookups answer one focused question, such as a ticker snapshot, the biggest option trades, an expected move, gamma levels, open-interest levels, or IV rank.
- Session screens find unusual activity, compare calls and puts, separate sweeps from blocks, measure 0DTE participation, or summarize where premium concentrated.
- Multi-step reports connect flow, volatility, open interest, and modeled market structure across one or more chapters.
Daily Market Recap is the flagship multi-step report and the best place to start. It is TradingFlow's canonical Market Recap experience; the Market Recap link in the top navigation opens this exact recipe.
Every recipe is explicit about what its pattern does not claim. Read each one with the same discipline: the report shows you what the data did; it does not identify who traded, why they traded, or what happens next.
Opening a report: freshness and provenance
Open any official template and TradingFlow immediately tells you which session you're looking at and when its data was last resolved.
The report header. A run names its represented session and last-run time before you read a single chart.
- Origin — official routes are official by definition and do not repeat that label in a banner. An owner-only or forked report keeps a small Private provenance badge and may identify the official template it came from. Recipes do not have public, organization, or share-link states.
- Represented session — every report names the exact trading session its numbers describe, and whether that's the latest completed session or a historical one you picked.
- Refresh data — re-runs the complete recipe and requests a fresh snapshot for the represented session. The last good report remains visible during the refresh.
- Date picker — re-runs the same template for any earlier session instead of the latest one. Historical runs are on demand too; nothing is pre-baked ahead of time.
- Recipe map — opens a customer-readable map from input cells to live data and visible cells. Multi-step recipes may show a richer evidence flow in the same panel.
Recipe-specific inputs live inside the notebook. Changing one creates draft values and reveals one recipe-wide Run dock; Run refreshes every dependent cell together, while Discard changes restores the last successful values.
Freshness rule: "latest" always follows the market calendar, not the wall clock. Before the open, and on weekends or holidays, "latest" means the most recently completed session — never a not-yet-traded date.
Reading a report
A report is organized into numbered chapters you can jump between from a sticky table of contents, with a Bottom line up top and Takeaways at the end.
A single chapter — here, "Market tone" — pairs a short explanation with the charts that back it up. The left rail tracks where you are as you scroll.
Daily Market Recap's eight chapters are a good template for how to think about a session, whether or not you're reading that exact report:
- Market tone — was the day's flow risk-on or risk-off, by premium?
- Where the money went — which names absorbed the most premium?
- Intraday rhythm — when during the session did flow actually hit?
- Classified exposure context — Net DEI and Net DEX across the session. See Delta Exposure (DEX).
- Volatility pricing — where does IV rank sit today? See Greeks & GEX.
- Modeled gamma structure — the session's GEX backdrop. See Greeks & GEX.
- The movers — which names actually moved, and how much?
- Spotlight — a closer look at the single headline name of the day.
Every chart and table lives inside the chapter it supports — a report never separates a number from the explanation of what it means. Each report also states, in plain language near the top, what its numbers are and are not built from (for example, that sentiment is feed-precomputed and a "neutral" print is not directional) — read that note once per report, since it tells you exactly how to interpret every chart below it.
Run a recipe from start to finish
- Open Cookbooks and choose an official recipe by the question on its card. The Recipes directory is the public map of the current catalog.
- Check the title, description, origin, declared inputs, and interpretation limits before treating any output as evidence.
- Open the report. It resolves the latest completed U.S. trading session by default; use the date picker when you need a historical session.
- Set any recipe-specific inputs shown inside the report, then press the notebook Run control to update their dependent cells. Use header Refresh data when you need a fresh complete snapshot for the represented session.
- Read the output in order. Keep the represented session and each dataset's freshness labels attached to the numbers as you move between prose, KPIs, tables, and charts.
- Use AI Insight only if you want an optional explanation of that specific run. It does not change the recipe, and its response is not a trade signal.
- Follow a result into Rank Contracts, Rank Symbols, or Option Trades when you need to validate the underlying contracts, structure, or prints.
Edit a recipe with AI Chat (when available)
Recipe authoring is separate from ordinary Cookbook access. It requires a paid account, the authoring rollout on your account, and the applicable TradingFlow AI consent and credit gates. If you do not see New recipe, Edit with AI, or Edit recipe, authoring is not available on that account; you can still run every official recipe.
There are two ways to enter the authoring workspace:
- Start from an official recipe. Open its report and select Edit with AI. TradingFlow forks the official template into a private working copy; the official version never changes.
- Start from a blank recipe. Select New recipe in Cookbooks. The AI sidebar opens beside an empty preview and builds the first draft from your description.
Tell the assistant what should change
The most reliable prompt names the research question, the part of the current recipe that may change, the input the reader controls, the evidence to show, and what must stay untouched. You do not need to write SQL or describe the internal recipe format.
Use this pattern:
Build or change [the report or section] so I can answer [the research question]. Let the reader choose [symbol, date, lookback, or another input]. Show [KPIs, table columns, chart, or explanation]. Keep [the existing parts that must remain]. State [freshness or interpretation limit].
For example, after opening Daily Market Recap with Edit with AI:
Keep every existing chapter. Change Spotlight so the reader can choose a symbol, with NVDA as the default. Show total option premium, call/put premium, average trade size, and the ten largest trades for the represented session. Keep the market-tone and index-GEX chapters unchanged, and state that sentiment does not prove opening activity.
For a smaller follow-up, be equally explicit:
Keep everything else unchanged. Rename Spotlight to Symbol focus, move it after Where the money went, and add one short explanation above its table. Do not remove any existing evidence blocks.
Specific preservation language matters. An instruction such as “make this an NVDA report” leaves the assistant to decide what to replace; “keep every existing chapter and change only Spotlight” defines the boundary you can review.
Review each AI edit in the live preview
When the assistant applies an edit, the workspace updates the unsaved preview and shows AI edit applied to the preview. Before sending the next prompt:
- Check the title and description still describe the actual report.
- Check every reader-controlled input has a clear label and sensible default.
- Confirm the requested KPI, table, chart, or explanation appears in the right place.
- Compare the rest of the report with the previous version. If TradingFlow says blocks were removed, verify that every removal was intentional.
- Read the freshness and interpretation notes. A valid chart can still support an overbroad conclusion.
- If the edit is wrong, select Undo before making another AI edit.
Changing a recipe input in the preview does not rewrite the recipe. It changes the draft value for that run; use the notebook's Run control to refresh all dependent evidence together. Editing the input's definition—its label, default, or meaning—is a recipe change and goes through validation like any other AI edit.
Refine one decision at a time
Short follow-up prompts are easier to verify than one large rewrite. A practical sequence is:
- Define the report's question and inputs.
- Ask for the evidence blocks and their order.
- Add interpretation and freshness limits.
- Make presentation changes without changing the evidence.
- Run the preview with at least one realistic input before saving.
Use observable requests such as “sort the table by premium descending and show ten rows” or “add a Symbol input with SPY as the default.” Avoid subjective prompts such as “make it smarter” unless you also state what the finished report must contain.
Save only after the preview is correct
- Save persists the current working recipe. For an existing private recipe, it updates that recipe; for a new draft, it creates the private recipe and moves the workspace to its saved address.
- Save as… creates a separate private copy with a new recipe slug. Use it when you want to preserve the original version as a branch.
- A successful preview is not a save. Do not leave the workspace until the header shows Saved if you intend to keep the changes.
Before persistence, TradingFlow validates the recipe and performs a read-only dry run when the change affects parameters, data queries, or anchors. If another tab saved a newer revision first, the older tab cannot overwrite it; reload the current version or use Save as… when you intentionally want a separate copy.
After saving, return to My recipes, open View report, choose the represented session and any declared inputs, and run it as a reader would. This last pass catches a recipe that looked right in the editing preview but does not answer the intended question with real input values.
AI Insight is not recipe editing
These two AI actions have different jobs:
| Action | What it changes | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| AI Insight | Nothing in the recipe | Explain the data in one completed report run. |
| Edit with AI / AI Chat in the workspace | The unsaved private working draft | Add, remove, reorder, or rewrite recipe inputs and evidence blocks before saving. |
If you ask the assistant to change a recipe while you are only viewing the report, it should direct you to Edit with AI. Entering the workspace is what gives AI Chat an editable draft.
Full workflow, start to finish
- Choose a starting point. Open an official report and select Edit with AI to fork it, or select New recipe in the Cookbooks gallery to start with a blank workspace. An official template is never edited in place.
- Describe the report or change. Use the AI sidebar to state the question, editable scope, reader inputs, evidence, output shape, and limits. For a blank recipe, the first proposal creates the working draft.
- Review the live preview. Check the title, description, inputs, explanations, KPIs, tables, charts, links, and caveats. A preview is a draft, not a saved report.
- Refine before saving. Ask for one bounded change at a time, inspect any removed-block warning, and use Undo when the proposal changed more than intended.
- Save deliberately. Select Save to persist the current private recipe, or Save as… to create a separate private copy. The saved report appears under My recipes and is visible only to its owner.
- Run the saved recipe. Open View report, choose the represented session and any declared inputs, then run and read it with the same freshness and interpretation checks as an official recipe.
Authoring and AI Insight are separate actions: editing changes a working recipe draft; AI Insight explains one completed run. Neither publishes a recipe or makes it visible to another user.
If something does not work
- The editing controls are missing: recipe authoring is not enabled for that account. This is separate from paid access to official Cookbooks.
- The sidebar asks for consent or credits: complete the one-time AI privacy notice or resolve the displayed credit gate, then return to the same workspace.
- The preview is empty for one date or input: try a represented session and input known to contain data before redesigning the recipe; “no data” is different from an invalid recipe.
- The edit removed more than expected: select Undo, then repeat the request with “keep everything else unchanged” and name the exact section that may change.
- Save reports that the recipe changed elsewhere: reload to adopt the newer saved revision, or use Save as… to keep your current draft as a separate private copy.
- You cannot share the result: that is intentional. User recipes are owner-only; there is no public, organization, or share-link state.
The freemium boundary, plainly
Cookbooks works differently from Option Trades and Rank: there is no free preview. Every route in the library — the gallery itself, every official report, and every private recipe — requires a paid plan.
- Guests who follow a link to Cookbooks are sent to sign in, then straight to the paywall, and land on the exact page they tried to open once they subscribe.
- Signed-in users without a paid plan land on the paywall the same way.
- Paid users get the full official library, date picker, and report controls. Creating or editing My recipes remains a separate limited rollout; existing private recipes stay owner-only.
If you want to sample Cookbooks before upgrading, the gallery's own template cards and descriptions (like the ones on this page) are the closest thing to a preview — the reports themselves only open for paid accounts.
What to do next
Start with Daily Market Recap — read it chapter by chapter the way you'd read this guide, then compare what it shows against a name on your own watchlist. When a chapter's evidence points somewhere specific, follow it into Rank Symbols or Option Trades to validate the exact contracts and prints behind it.