Trade journaling · Beginner

Tracking Emotional State And Discipline

Record the state before you enter. Recorded afterwards, every loss was rushed and every win was calm.

Last reviewed 15 September 2026 by the MarketPro research desk · Editorial policy

In short

Type one word into the journal row before you enter: calm, rushed, chasing, angry or overconfident. Choose it before the outcome is known, because a state recorded afterwards only reflects the result. Once you have 25 to 30 trades in a state, group by that word and compare the plan-followed rate, the average risk taken and the average R across the groups.

What to remember

Pick the word before the outcome is known. A state recorded afterwards just records whether you won.
In one measured log, revenge trades averaged 1.9% risk against 0.9% on calm trades, on the worst-performing rows.
A rare state needs 25 to 30 entries before its average means anything at all.
The finding is worth only the mechanical rule you attach to it, because judgement is the thing that fails in that state.

Lesson 5 of 14 in Trade journaling and review

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One word, typed before the order goes in

Record your state as a single word in the journal row, chosen before you enter: calm, rushed, chasing, angry, or overconfident. That is the whole method. It exists so that when results deteriorate you can tell whether the strategy stopped working or whether you stopped following it, which are opposite problems with opposite fixes.

The word has to be picked before the outcome is known. Asked afterwards, a trader who lost calls the entry rushed and a trader who won calls it calm, and the column turns into a record of results rather than of states.

180 trades sorted by the word in front of them

Six months of one log, grouped by the state field, with the plan-followed column counted alongside.

State	Trades	Plan followed	Avg risk	Avg R
Calm	112	96%	0.9%	+0.31
Rushed	34	71%	1.1%	-0.06
Chasing a missed move	19	42%	1.6%	-0.58
After a loss	15	40%	1.9%	-0.71

The calm rows are the business. They are 62% of the trades and they produce +34.7R. The bottom two rows are 34 trades, just under a fifth of the total, and between them they give back 21.7R, which is roughly two thirds of what the calm trades earned.

Now look at the risk column. The average position on a trade taken after a loss was more than twice the size of a calm one, on the rows with the worst results. That pairing is not a coincidence: size creeps up precisely when the motive is to recover something, which is when the trade least deserves it.

What the two worst rows cost a 5,000 USD account

Put the same distribution on a 5,000 USD account and price every row in percentage points. The fifteen after-a-loss trades, at an average 1.9% risk and an average of -0.71R, cost about 20 points, a little over 1,000 USD, from 8% of the trades in the log. The nineteen chasing trades cost another 18 points. The calm rows earned about 31 points across the same six months, so two states holding 34 of the 180 trades gave back more than the other 146 earned.

None of that is a strategy problem. Nothing about the entry rules changed between the groups. Thirty-four decisions taken in two identifiable states undid a working six months. That is what the state column is for: it converts "I need more discipline" into thirty-four specific rows you can write a rule against, and the drawdown calculator will tell you what removing it is worth at your own numbers.

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Five words beat a ten-point scale

The temptation is to rate intensity out of ten. Resist it. A number is not comparable between a Tuesday in March and a Thursday in September, because the scale drifts with whatever you have been feeling recently, and it cannot be grouped into buckets large enough to read.

A closed list of five words is comparable, groups cleanly, and takes one keystroke. Keep the list fixed. Adding a sixth word halfway through a year splits the sample in two and leaves both halves too small to mean anything, which is the same failure that kills over-detailed journal templates.

Where self-reported mood stops being evidence

The column is a self-report, and self-reports drift. Three limits are worth knowing before you act on one.

The label is not the cause. "Chasing" names a feeling, not a mechanism. Those trades may lose because they are entered late into an extended move, which is a setup problem wearing a psychological costume.
Rare states have tiny samples. Six trades marked overconfident tell you nothing at all. Wait for 25 to 30 in a state before reading its average as more than a hint.
Honesty decays once you know the answer. Having discovered that the chasing rows are bad, there is quiet pressure not to type the word again. A state column that reads 95% calm a month after you found otherwise has stopped measuring anything.

Turning a state into a rule that binds

A finding in this column is worth exactly the rule you attach to it, and the rule has to be mechanical, because the moment it applies is the moment your judgement is least available.

A cooling-off period. If the after-a-loss row is the bad one, the rule is a fixed wait, say twenty minutes with no new order, not a resolution to be careful.
A hard stop for the day. Two losses, or a fixed percentage, and the platform closes. This is the highest-value rule in the risk rules precisely because it binds when you would not.
A size cap that does not move. If risk crept to 1.9% on revenge trades, the fix is a lot size taken from the position size calculator before the session starts, not adjusted during it.

Read the column without commentary. It is data about a person under pressure, which describes everyone who trades, and treating a bad row as a verdict on your character is the fastest way to stop recording it honestly.

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Written and reviewed by the MarketPro research desk

MarketPro is a trading-signal and trading-education app operated by Harajuku Holdings LTD (Cyprus). Our signal desk publishes and tracks every trade idea in-app, and every page here is checked against the app's live behaviour before publishing. Last reviewed 15 September 2026. How we produce signals and content · About MarketPro

FAQ

Tracking Emotional State And Discipline: questions

How do you track emotional state in a trading journal?

Type one word into the row before you enter: calm, rushed, chasing, angry or overconfident. Choose it before the outcome is known, because a state recorded afterwards simply mirrors the result. Then group your trades by that word once you have 25 to 30 in a state, and compare plan-followed rate, average risk and average R across the groups.

Does recording emotions actually change trading results?

Not on its own. What it does is convert a vague sense of needing more discipline into a countable problem, such as fifteen trades taken after a loss at twice your normal size. The improvement comes from the mechanical rule you attach to that finding, like a fixed cooling-off period or a hard daily stop that the platform enforces rather than you.

How many trades before the emotion column says anything?

Around 25 to 30 trades in a given state. Rare states fill slowly, so six entries marked overconfident are not yet evidence of anything. The common states, calm and rushed, usually reach a readable sample within two or three months of regular trading.

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Not investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results.