Why journal at all
Your broker statement tells you what happened. A journal tells you why. Over a few hundred trades it shows which setups pay you, which hours cost you, and which habits — moving stops, revenge trades, oversizing after a loss — quietly eat the edge you do have.
Log three moments, not one
1. Before the session
- Your plan: key levels, the setups you are looking for, and what would make you sit out.
- Your state: sleep, mood, anything outside trading that’s on your mind. It sounds soft; it shows up in the numbers.
- Your limits: max loss for the day, max number of trades.
2. At the trade
- Instrument, side, size, entry, stop and target before you know the outcome.
- The setup name (keep a short fixed list so you can compare them later).
- A screenshot of the chart at entry.
3. After the close
- Exit price and reason: target, stop, or a discretionary exit — and was that exit in the plan?
- Which of your rules you followed and which you broke.
- One sentence: what would you do differently?
Review weekly, in numbers
Once a week, look at expectancy per setup, P&L by time of day, and the cost of each broken rule. You are looking for one change, not ten. Typical findings: “my first trade of the day is profitable, my fourth is not”, or “trades where I moved my stop lost 3× more than the rest.”
The expectancy calculator is a quick way to check a setup’s numbers by hand.
Mistakes that make journals useless
- Logging only P&L. Without the plan and the reason, you can’t learn anything.
- Logging only the losers. Your winners tell you what to do more of.
- Never reviewing. A journal you don’t read is a diary.
- Too much friction. If logging takes ten minutes a trade, you’ll stop. Make it fast.
Spreadsheet or software?
A spreadsheet works for the first fifty trades. After that, the analysis you actually need — expectancy by setup, rule-break costs, drawdown tracking, the chart behind each trade — gets painful by hand. That is the gap LoggingTrades was built for: log a trade from a screenshot, see it replayed on a real chart, and get your habits priced in dollars, with everything stored on your own computer.
FAQ
How often should I review my trading journal?
A quick look after each session and a deeper, numbers-based review once a week.
What is the most important thing to log?
Your plan and reason at entry, recorded before you know the outcome — that is what lets you separate good decisions from lucky ones.