Trade journaling and review
Without a journal, a hundred trades teach you almost nothing. With one, they tell you exactly which setup is carrying you and which is bleeding.
- ✓ 14 lessons
- ✓ 55 minutes end to end
- ✓ Free in MarketPro
- ✓ No sign-up to start reading
A journal turns a run of trades into something you can question. The value is in the tagging rather than the recording: once fifty trades each carry a setup name, a session, a timeframe and a note on the state you were in when you entered, the question "which of these should I stop taking" has an answer instead of an opinion. Fifty untagged screenshots answer nothing at all.
This category covers what to capture at entry and what to add at exit, how to tag setups so the groups stay large enough to compare, annotating charts, recording emotional state without it becoming a diary, and the statistics worth tracking: expectancy, win rate and average result by setup, holding time, and where in the week the losses cluster.
It works alongside trading psychology, which names the patterns a journal exposes, and it feeds the review cadence in a written trading plan.
The 14 lessons in order
No lesson matches that. to see all 14.
- Why Keep A Trading Journal Memory is a highlight reel. A journal is the only record that shows what your trading actually did.
- What To Record In Every Trade Entry An entry holding only entry price, exit price and profit cannot answer a single question you will want to ask later.
- Screenshotting And Annotating Your Charts The numbers say the trade was a clean process loss. The entry screenshot often says the level was never really there.
- Tagging Trades By Setup Type An overall result is four or five different things averaged together, and the average hides which of them is paying.
- Tracking Emotional State And Discipline Record the state before you enter. Recorded afterwards, every loss was rushed and every win was calm.
- Calculating Win Rate Versus Risk-Reward Neither figure means anything alone. Expectancy is the one number in your journal that says whether the process pays.
- Reviewing Losing Trades Objectively A loss that followed your plan and a loss that broke it need opposite responses, and mixing them up wrecks working strategies.
- Reviewing Winning Trades For A Repeatable Edge The question a winning trade has to answer is not whether it paid, but whether it would pay again.
- Weekly And Monthly Review Routines A review that happens because you just had a big loss is a review conducted by the loss. Schedule both cadences instead.
- Spotting Patterns Across Your Journal Cut the same trades five different ways and see what survives. The cut almost nobody makes is usually the loudest.
- Journaling Pre-Trade Checklists Recording whether each box was actually ticked turns your discipline from an impression into a column you can measure.
- Tracking Slippage And Execution Quality Log the price you intended beside the price you got. Over a few hundred trades it tells you how much of your edge actually…
- Using Journal Data To Refine Position Sizing The two figures that should set your risk per trade are already in your journal, and neither is in the rule of thumb you started…
- Common Journaling Mistakes To Avoid An incomplete journal is worse than no journal, because it produces numbers that look real and are not.
Guided paths that use these lessons
A path is an ordered run through lessons from several categories, which is how the app sequences them. One path draws on trade journaling and review.
Take trade journaling and review with you
All 14 lessons in this category, plus the other 306 in the academy, with a quiz on each one and your place kept. Free on any MarketPro account, in the app or your browser.
Same account as the app · No install · Free to start
Not investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results.