Where your data lives, backups and privacy

One folder on your computer

Your portfolio, watchlist, journal, research, settings and the desk's database are in the desk's own folder in your user account:

• Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Trading Desk. Updating the app, or removing it, leaves that folder alone.
• Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Trading Desk, as the app sees it. Updates through the Microsoft Store keep it. Windows keeps a Store app's files in that app's own storage and can remove them when the app is uninstalled, so export your records (Settings → Your data) before you uninstall.

Settings → Data paths shows where each part is.

Backups

The desk backs up your portfolio before it changes it: saving it or importing a CSV first keeps the previous version beside it, named with the change and the time. Saving a thesis card keeps the old card in the theses folder's backups. There is no backup button to remember. To keep a copy elsewhere, copy the whole folder, or export your records from Settings → Your data.

Secrets

If you set up a phone channel, its token or address goes into your computer's own keychain (Keychain on a Mac, Credential Manager on Windows), never into the desk's folder, its logs or its database. The trial's start date is kept there too.

What leaves your computer

• Market data: the desk asks free public sources for prices, macro figures, news and filings. They see the tickers asked about, as any website you visit would.
• The AI provider you chose: tickers, weights and percentages, never quantities or amounts in money, and your own notes (thesis cards, watchlist reasons) with any line that looks like an amount removed. Deep research also searches the web through the provider's own tools (details).
• A second price source, only if you add your own key: EODHD gets the ticker symbols involved and your key.
• Your phone channels, if you turn them on: the brief and alerts (what is sent).
• No account with us: the app has no analytics, no crash reporting and no update checks of its own, and no activation server. On Windows, the window is drawn by Microsoft's WebView2, which follows your Windows diagnostic-data settings.

The privacy page goes through every source.