You opened a spreadsheet, gave it a column for everything, and filled it in carefully for a week. Then you had a bad trade, skipped the entry, and never opened the file again.
That is how most trading journals end. A big form takes a while to fill in. On the day you lose, that is longer than you want to look at the trade. So you skip it once, and the second time is easier.
Here is a version small enough to survive a bad week.
What should you write down for every trade?
Five things. That's the whole list to start with.
- The date and the market. "Tuesday, EUR/USD" or "Nasdaq futures, morning."
- The direction. Did you buy, hoping price goes up (traders call that going long), or sell, hoping it goes down (going short)?
- Where your stop and your target were. The stop is the price where you get out at a loss. The target is the price where you planned to take profit.
- The result in R. R is your result in units of risk: +2R means you made twice what you risked, and −1R means you lost what you planned to lose.
- What you checked before you entered. A few things, in your own words. "Price at my level from yesterday, bigger chart moving up, a strong candle closed."
Why R instead of money? A result in money depends on how big you traded that day. R doesn't.
Here is an example. On Monday you risk ten dollars and make twenty. On Friday you risk a hundred and make two hundred. In money those look very different. In R they are the same trade: both made twice what you risked. That lets you compare a small trade from March with a big one from June fairly.
Why is "what you checked" the field that pays off?
Your results tell you what happened. The things you checked tell you why you took the trade.
After a couple of months, that second part lets you ask useful questions. Do my trades work better when the bigger chart is moving my way? Do I lose more when I get in before my candle closes? Without it, you only have a list of wins and losses and a feeling about which ones were good.
Use the same name for the same thing every time. If you write "trend up" on Monday and "bullish" on Thursday and mean the same thing, you now have two names for one thing. Later you'll count them apart by mistake. Pick a name and stick with it.
Do you have to log the losing trades too?
Yes, and the boring ones.
The trades you want to skip are the ones that keep the journal honest. If you only log the trades you're proud of, three months from now your journal will say you're a better trader than you are, and you'll make choices based on that.
The same goes for the trades you took out of boredom and the ones where you broke your own rule. Those especially. They're often where the money leaks out.
When should you fill it in?
Right after the trade closes, before you close the chart. Two minutes.
The details are still fresh, and you haven't started telling yourself a story about the trade yet. If you trade several times a day, logging each trade as it closes is still easier than trying to remember them all in the evening.
A screenshot of the chart is nice to have. If taking the screenshot is what makes you skip the entry, skip the screenshot.
What do you do with it once a week?
Pick one fixed time, same day every week, and give it twenty minutes. Look at:
- your best trade and your worst trade, and what was different about them;
- any rule you broke, and what it cost you;
- whether you logged every trade.
In the first weeks you won't crack your strategy, and you don't need to. The point is the habit, and catching mistakes while you still remember them.
What can a journal tell you after twenty trades?
Less than you'd hope.
Twenty trades can't tell you whether your strategy works. Flip a coin twenty times and you can easily get fourteen heads. A short run of trades can look great or awful by luck in the same way.
What twenty trades can tell you is whether you followed your own plan. Did you only take the trades your plan says to take? Did you move your stop? Did you trade bigger after a win? Those questions have answers from the first week, and fixing them is often worth more than any change to the strategy.
The bigger question comes later. Six months of journaling and nothing changed is about the step after this one: turning a pile of logged trades into questions you can answer.
What should a forex trader add?
One field: the session. That is the part of the day you traded in, such as the London morning or the quiet hours after New York closes. The same trade can behave very differently in those two, and you'll never see it unless you wrote it down. The forex trading journal page has more on what to write down for currency pairs.
How do you know the list is too long?
You start skipping entries. That's the only sign you need.
When it happens, cut fields until you stop skipping. You can always add a field later, when you have a question it would answer. What to track in a trading journal goes through the fields worth adding once the habit sticks, and the ones to leave out.
Questions people ask next
Should I use a notebook, a spreadsheet or an app?
Use the one you will still open next month. A paper notebook works for the habit. A spreadsheet or an app is easier once you want to count things across many trades.
How long should a journal entry take?
About two minutes per trade. If it takes much longer, your list is too long and you will start skipping.
Should I write down my emotions?
One short word is enough, like "calm" or "rushed". A score from one to ten that you never look at again only makes the entry longer. Whether you followed your rules tells you more.
What if I miss a day?
Fill in what you remember, mark it as written later, and carry on. A journal with one gap is still useful. A journal you abandoned because it had a gap is not.
What can you do this week?
Open whatever you'll actually use: a notebook, a spreadsheet or an app. Make the five fields. Log every trade this week right after it closes, including the ones you'd rather forget. On Sunday, spend twenty minutes looking back.
In the EdgeFlow trading journal, the "what you checked" part is a set of boxes you tick. You can also describe a trade in your own words and have it turned into those boxes, so you don't have to invent the names yourself.