Trade Journaling
A trade journal is where every other part of this course gets checked against what happened. A plan, an entry, a managed position, a review, none of it compounds into real improvement without a record specific enough to look back on.
What to log, beyond just win or lose
A useful entry covers the setup type, the planned entry, stop, and target against what was filled, the size taken, and the reason for the entry written in the trader’s own words at the time, not reconstructed afterward to sound more logical than it was. Whether that reason held up, checked honestly once the trade is closed, is the part most journals skip and the part that teaches something.
A worked example
A single entry doesn’t need to be long, just specific:
Date: 14 September Instrument: GER40, London session Setup: Breakout retest above 19,800 Planned: Entry 19,805, stop 19,770, target 19,875 (2R) Actual: Filled 19,808 (limit order), stop and target unchanged Size: 0.5% risk Reason at the time: “Clean 15-minute close above resistance, retest held on lower timeframe, no major data due for two hours” Result: Stopped out at 19,770 (-1R) Reviewed: Setup was valid, reason held up, stop respected structure. Loss is normal variance, not a process error.
The last two lines are the ones that get reread later, not the result on its own.
Why writing the reason down matters more than the result
The outcome of a single trade says very little on its own, this course’s section on consistency already covers why. What a written, contemporaneous reason for the entry provides is something a result alone can’t: a way to check, over dozens of trades, whether a trader’s own read of their setups is reliable, or whether it just feels reliable in the moment and doesn’t hold up once compared honestly against what happened next.
What to use to keep one
A plain spreadsheet is the simplest starting point, one row per trade, and it’s enough for most traders: fully customisable, easy to filter and sort by setup type or session, and it forces the same fields to be filled in every time. Dedicated journaling apps exist too, some import trades automatically from a broker and calculate the metrics covered in Post-Session Review without manual entry. That’s a convenience upgrade, not a fundamentally different one, a well-kept spreadsheet with consistent fields does the same underlying job. The format matters far less than whether every trade gets logged, including the ones that feel too obvious or too embarrassing to bother writing down.
A journal only works if it gets reread
Logging every trade without periodically reading the log back, weekly or monthly, turns the journal into a diary nobody revisits. The value isn’t in any single entry, it’s in the pattern that only becomes visible across dozens of them: a setup that consistently underperforms its stated logic, a session time that quietly costs more than it earns, sizing that’s crept up without a conscious decision behind it. None of that shows up from a single trade, and none of it shows up at all if the journal never gets reopened.
Key takeaways
- Log the setup, the planned versus actual entry, stop, and target, the size, and the reason for the entry in your own words at the time
- Whether that stated reason held up is what most journals skip, and it’s the part that teaches something
- A single trade’s result says little on its own; a written reason lets a pattern across many trades be checked honestly
- A plain spreadsheet is enough for most traders; dedicated apps add convenience, not a fundamentally different function
- A journal that’s never reread is just a diary, the value is in periodically rereading it and spotting the pattern a single entry can’t show
Nothing on this page is financial advice. Trade your own account, manage your own risk.
Nothing on this page is financial advice. Trade your own account, manage your own risk.