Keeping a Trading Journal

The weekly pass is deliberately shallow. You are not trying to explain why a trade lost, you are counting how many times the same note appears. Three instances of "moved the stop" in one week is a finding. One instance is a Tuesday.

Monthly, an hour. Compute the numbers. Average R, expectancy, results broken down by setup type, by instrument, by session, and by day of week. This is where the journal earns its keep, because the breakdowns almost always show something you did not believe.

What the numbers usually reveal

Three findings turn up so often they are worth expecting.

The first is concentration. One or two setups typically carry the results, and a long tail of setups you also trade contribute roughly nothing, minus costs. The fix is arithmetic rather than insight: trade fewer things.

The second is a single leak. Very often one habit accounts for most of the damage, and it is usually either cutting winners early or taking revenge trades at inflated size. Consider a month of 40 trades where the 34 planned trades average +0.2R (a gain of 6.8R) and six revenge trades average -1.4R (a loss of 8.4R). The month is negative, the strategy is not the problem, and no amount of indicator tuning would have found it. Only the journal shows it.

The third is timing. Results by session and by hour are often lopsided in a way nobody predicts about themselves, and narrowing your trading window to the hours that work is free performance. The sessions guide explains why certain hours behave differently.

Make it sustainable

A spreadsheet with ten columns that you actually fill in beats an elaborate template you abandon in a fortnight. Start small and add a column only when you have a question it answers. If a field has been blank for a month, delete it.

Fill it in at the moment of entry rather than at the end of the day. The reasoning field in particular is worth nothing if it is written hours later, because by then you know the outcome and your description will bend towards it without you noticing. Two minutes at entry beats twenty minutes of reconstruction in the evening.

Two additions repay themselves quickly. Journal the trades you skipped and why, because a record of temptations resisted is the only proof that your rules are working. And record the position size calculation itself, so that when a loss turns out larger than planned you can see whether the arithmetic or the fill was responsible. The position size calculator makes that step consistent enough to audit.

The journal only works if the person writing it tells the truth. There is no external auditor here, nobody reads it, and that is exactly why the temptation to soften a description is strong. An honest entry about a rule you broke is worth more than a week of tidy ones about trades that went well on their own.