What To Record In Every Trade Entry

The context fields people skip

Three fields get dropped first, and they are the three that carry most of the later value.

Session. The same setup behaves differently at 08:00 London and 16:00 New York, because the participants and the typical range differ. Record which session was live, not just the clock time. Session overlap is a large part of what decides whether a level holds.

Market condition. One word is enough: trending, ranging, or volatile. A mean reversion setup that loses in a trend and wins in a range is not a broken setup, it is a setup with a filter you have not written down yet.

State before entry. Calm, rushed, chasing, or trading after a loss. This is the field that separates a strategy problem from an execution problem, and it costs one word.

None of the three needs a form or a dropdown. One word in a cell is enough, and its value comes entirely from the same word meaning the same thing every time you type it.

Plan followed belongs in its own column

The most useful single column in a journal is a yes or no answering whether you traded your plan, recorded independently of the result. The four combinations are not equally interesting.

• Followed the plan, made money. The system did what it should.
• Followed the plan, lost money. Ordinary variance, and it needs no change at all.
• Broke the plan, lost money. The obvious lesson, and the easiest one to absorb.
• Broke the plan, made money. The dangerous one, because the account balance rewards the behaviour you are trying to stop.

Count the fourth category over a quarter. If it is more than a few per cent of your trades, your real strategy and your written strategy have drifted apart, and the written one is no longer the one running the account.

Answering that column truthfully is harder than it sounds, because it is filled in by the person it judges. Define the plan tightly enough that the answer is mechanical: if the entry matched a written setup, the risk sat inside the cap, and the stop went where it was supposed to go, the answer is yes. Anything that needs an argument is a no.

Where over-recording kills the habit

A twenty-five field template is abandoned within a month, and the failure is predictable. You add fields because each one looks useful on its own, entry time creeps past three minutes, and then one busy week ends the whole thing. A journal with gaps is not a smaller journal, it is a biased one, because the entries you skip are not a random sample.

Keep the template fixed for at least fifty trades before changing it. Changing columns mid-sample means the first thirty entries and the next thirty cannot be compared, which is the exact job the journal exists to do. When you do add a field, add it because a review you actually ran hit a question the log could not answer. Size and risk both come out of the position size calculator before the order goes in, so those two fields cost nothing at entry time.