How to keep a trading journal that's actually useful

A guide to keeping a real trading journal: what to log, what to measure and why most people quit within three weeks.

Most trading journals are abandoned within three weeks. Not out of laziness: because they give nothing back. You log trades for a month, look at the sheet, and all you see is what you already knew: some days you win and some you lose.

A journal is useful when it answers a question you can't answer from memory. That's what this guide is about.

What almost everyone logs, and why it's not enough

The typical journal has these columns: date, symbol, side, entry, exit, result. With that you can calculate your win rate and profit factor, and not much else.

The problem is that those numbers describe the past but don't tell you what to change. A 45% win rate doesn't tell you whether you overtrade, move your stop, or whether your best days are Tuesdays.

The three things that actually change something

1. Whether you followed your plan

One single question after each trade: did you follow your plan? And if not, what did you break.

This is what separates a journal from a results sheet. Because then you can compare two things that usually get mixed up:

• Good trades that went wrong: plan followed, negative result. That's the market, and there's nothing to fix.
• Bad trades that went right: you broke the plan and won. Those are the dangerous ones: they reinforce what will cost you the account next month.

2. The days you decide not to trade

A day when you watch the market and decide to stay out is a trading decision, and for funded traders it's often the one that saves the account.

If you don't log it, those days don't exist in your history and your discipline looks worse than it is.

3. The reason, not just the result

"Entered on FOMO" repeated nine times in a month is actionable information. "−$450" repeated nine times isn't.

What NOT to log

Beware of the journal that asks for twenty fields per trade. That one gets abandoned the day you're in a hurry, and an abandoned journal is worth nothing.

If it takes you more than a minute to log a trade, the journal is too big. Better five fields filled in every time than twenty filled in for a week.

How often to review it

• Every day, at the close: log your trades. One minute.
• Every week: see which mistake repeats. Ten minutes.
• Every month: check whether the mistake you saw four weeks ago has gone down. That's the only thing that measures whether the journal is working.

Manual or automatic journal

Platforms that import your trades for you sell convenience, and convenience has a price: you stop looking at them.

Writing a trade by hand is twenty seconds where you're forced to remember why you entered. That's the work. If the journal does everything for you, you have a very pretty account statement.

The sensible approach: let the numbers sync automatically, and always add your part by hand: whether you followed the plan and why you entered.

Start with this

If you're setting up a journal this week, start with six fields:

With that, in a month, you can answer the question that matters: how much does breaking my own plan cost me?

And if you trade funded accounts, the next thing you need to understand is why you can blow an account while you're green.

TradiBook by

WHO WRITES THIS

Alejandro Santiago

Funded account trader and trading coach: he reviews other traders' trading and helps them stop blowing accounts. That's where TradiBook came from. He didn't build it to sell a product: he built it because he needed to track his own accounts and no tool measured what mattered to him. Building it for his case, it ended up fitting anyone who trades funded accounts, because the problems are the same: the floor that moves, the accounts lost along the way and the plan that isn't followed.