Download a trading journal template and you'll usually get twenty-five columns. Most of them get filled in for a week and are never read again.
Here is one trade, written down the short way:
Tuesday, EUR/USD, long (bought). Stop below the morning low, target at yesterday's high. Result: made twice what I risked. Checked before entering: bigger chart moving up, price at my level from Monday, strong candle close. Market: trending, quiet. Got in after a small dip. Moved the stop to my entry price after the first push up. Followed my rules: yes.
That's the whole list. Below is each line, why it earns its place, and what a template usually adds that you can leave out.
Entry, stop and target
These three you can't skip.
Your entry is the price you got in at. Your stop is the price where you get out if the trade goes against you. Your target is the price where you planned to take profit.
Without them, you can't measure a trade against the risk you took, and you can't compare two trades fairly. In EdgeFlow they're required on every trade for that reason.
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.
Log it in R, not only in money. A result in money depends on how big you traded that day. R doesn't. Risk ten dollars and make twenty, and it's the same result as risking a hundred and making two hundred: twice your risk. So a small trade from March and a big one from June can sit side by side.
A trade without a stop has no R, which is one more reason the stop is on the must-have list.
What you checked before you entered
This is the field that turns a journal from a diary into something you can learn from.
Write down the two to five things you looked at before you took the trade, in your own words. Every style of trading has its own version:
- the bigger chart is moving in your direction;
- price is at a level you marked earlier;
- a moving average crossed (a moving average is the average price of the last so many candles, drawn as a line);
- price swept the lows before turning: it briefly pushed below a recent low, where many traders keep their stops, and came back up. Traders who follow smart money concepts, SMC for short, look for this.
Each of these is what traders call a confluence: one thing that argues for the trade.
Use the same name for the same thing every time. "Trend up" on Monday and "bullish" on Thursday is two names where you meant one, and later they get counted apart.
How to keep a trading journal explains why this is the field that pays off most.
What the market above you was doing
A word or two is enough. Was the bigger chart trending, which means moving steadily one way, or going sideways? Was the market quiet, or moving fast?
The same setup can do well in a trending market and badly in a sideways one. If you never write the market down, those trades get mixed together and the setup just looks average.
How you got in, and what you did after
Keep these apart from the setup.
How you got in: did you enter the moment the setup appeared, or wait for price to dip back a little first? What you did after: did you move your stop to your entry price, so the trade could no longer lose (traders call that break-even)? Did you take part of the profit early?
A good setup with a bad exit habit looks exactly like a bad setup in your results. If the two are mixed together, you might throw away the setup when the exit habit was the real problem. Is it your strategy or how you traded it goes deeper into telling those apart.
Did you follow your own rules?
Yes or no. If no, which rule.
In your first months this is the most useful single field in the journal. Twenty trades can't tell you whether your setup works, because a short run can look great or awful by luck alone. Twenty trades can tell you whether you did what you said you would do, and that answer is there from the first week.
Optional: how far the trade went for you and against you
How far did price go in your favour before the trade closed, and how far against you? Later on, this helps you see whether your stop is too close or your target too far away.
It's the first field to drop if it's costing you the habit.
What can you skip?
- Mood scored from one to ten. A short note when something was really off ("tired", or "revenge trade" for a trade taken to win back a loss) is worth more than a number on every trade.
- Indicator values with decimals. "Overbought", meaning price had run up a lot, is enough. The decimals tell you nothing extra.
- Anything you won't look at again. If you've never once sorted or filtered by a column, delete it.
A good test: for each field, name a question it will help you answer later. If you can't, it goes.
One extra line for crypto and futures
Crypto never closes. Write down the time of day, because an entry in the middle of a quiet Sunday night is a different trade from the same entry during the busy hours. The crypto trading journal page has more on this.
Futures are contracts to buy or sell something later, like oil or a stock index, at a price agreed now. Write down which contract you traded: the month it runs out, and whether it was the full-size version or the micro, the smaller one that moves the same way but risks less money. Note the time of day too, especially whether Europe and the US were both open. More on the futures trading journal page.
Questions people ask next
What is the most important thing to track?
The things you checked before you entered. Results tell you what happened. Those checks are the only record of why you took the trade, and they are what lets you compare your winners with your losers later.
Should I track profit in dollars or in R?
Both if you like, but R is the one that lets you compare trades. Money changes with the size you traded. R stays the same for the same kind of trade.
Do I need screenshots?
They help you remember a trade, but you can't count pictures. Take one if it's quick. Never let it be the reason you skip an entry.
How many fields is too many?
When you start skipping entries, you have too many. Cut until you stop skipping, then add a field only when you have a question it would answer.
Why a short list wins
A handful of fields you fill in on every trade will teach you more than forty fields you fill in on good days. Start short, keep it up for two months, and add a field only when you need it.
If you'd like these fields ready to go, the EdgeFlow trading journal has them built in. Entry, stop and target are required boxes, and the things you check are boxes you tick, so the list stays the same on every trade.