How to journal a trade

Most trading journals die in the second week. Not because the trader stopped caring, but because each entry took ten minutes, recorded the wrong things, and never told them anything back. A good journal entry is short, honest, and made of fields you can count later. This is what to record, and when.

Before the trade: the plan

The most valuable part of a journal entry is written before you know the outcome, because it cannot be rewritten by hindsight.

• The setup. Which of your defined setups is this? If it does not match one, that is worth knowing too.
• Entry, stop and target. The stop is what makes R multiples possible. Write the planned one, not the one you ended up with.
• Confidence, 1 to 10. How sure you are, honestly. Over time this tells you whether your confidence carries any information.

Better still, write a few lines before the session even starts: what you intend to do, your state of mind, the levels you are watching, and anything on the news calendar that could move your market while you are in a position.

Straight after: the facts

• Exit price, quantity and fees.With the entry and the contract’s point value these give the real result, net of commission.
• Did you follow your plan? Yes or no. Not a paragraph. This one field, counted over a hundred trades, is often the most revealing thing in the whole journal.
• The emotion you felt most. Pick one from a short fixed list (calm, anxious, FOMO, revenge, bored, overconfident) so it can be counted.
• The mistake, if there was one. Moved stop, early exit, chased entry, oversized. Tag it, from a fixed list. A mistake written in free text is a mistake you will never add up.

Fixed lists are the point. “Felt a bit off” cannot be analysed; “anxious” tagged on 23 trades with an average of −0.6R can.

At the end of the day: one paragraph

A short daily recap in your own words. What happened, what you did well, what you would do differently. Keep it to a few sentences so it actually gets written. A screenshot of the chart at entry is worth adding for trades you want to study later.

At the end of the week: one change

Read the week’s trades together, not one at a time. Look at which mistake cost the most, which setup paid, and whether your plan-followed trades did better than the others. Then pick one thing to change next week, and write it down where you will see it at the start of the next review. A focus you never check is a wish.

What not to do

• Do not write essays. If an entry takes more than a minute or two, you will stop doing it.
• Do not journal only the losers. Your winners tell you what your edge actually is, and skipping them skews every statistic.
• Do not grade yourself on the result. A well-executed trade can lose and a reckless one can win. Grade the process; the result is already recorded.
• Do not backfill psychology. Confidence and emotion recorded a week later are guesses. If you missed them, leave them blank.

A complete entry, start to finish

An illustrative example, not a real trade. It took under a minute, and every field except the note can be counted. After fifty of these, “early exit” has a total in R next to it.

Making it fast enough to keep

Speed is not a nice-to-have: a journal you skip on busy days only records your quiet days. In Traquil, logging is a slide-over form that remembers your usual instrument, session and setup, and a screenshot of your broker’s fills can draft the trade for you to check. The psychology fields are never pre-filled, because they are your honest answers. Session Prep handles the before, Reviews the after, and last week’s focus is quoted back at the top of this week’s review. More on that in the journal feature page.