The trading journal

A trading journal records what you did and why, at the moment you did it. That timing is the whole value. Written afterwards, your account of a trade is a reconstruction shaped by whether it won — losers become bad luck, winners become skill, and neither version is useful for improvement.

Record at entry: the pair, the timeframe, the setup name from your plan, entry, stop, target, risk in percent and in R, and one sentence on why now. Record at exit: exit price, result in R, and whether you followed the plan. That last field is the most important one in the entire journal, and it is independent of profit — a losing trade taken exactly by the rules is a good trade.

Add a small amount of context that you will not remember later: session, spread at entry, whether news was scheduled, and your state — rushed, calm, revenge, bored. Emotional tags feel awkward to write and become the most revealing column in the sheet after fifty trades, because they cluster around your worst outcomes with unpleasant reliability.

A losing trade taken exactly by the rules is a good trade. Grade the decision, not the outcome — the outcome is only ever one sample.

Screenshots are worth the ten seconds. Capture the chart at entry and again at exit. A page of thumbnails from a losing month teaches more in five minutes than a spreadsheet does in an hour, because your eye spots the repeated setup immediately.

Then actually review. Weekly: did I follow the plan, and what broke it? Monthly: which setup carries the results, which one bleeds, and what is my expectancy per setup? The journal is not a diary and not a compliance exercise; it is the dataset that turns fifty trades of experience into one improvement you can name.