Keeping a Trading Journal

You can't improve what you don't record

A trading journal is a structured log of every trade you take — not just the outcome, but the reasoning behind it. Without one, traders tend to remember their best trades vividly and conveniently forget or rationalize their worst ones, which makes honest self-assessment almost impossible.

What actually belongs in a useful journal entry

A journal entry worth keeping captures more than just "won" or "lost" — it captures the decision-making context, so patterns (good and bad) become visible over dozens of entries instead of staying invisible in memory.

• •The setup/reason for entering (what signal or analysis triggered the trade)
• •Entry price, stop-loss, take-profit, and position size
• •The actual outcome and R:R achieved
• •Your emotional state at entry and exit (calm? anxious? chasing a loss?)
• •A short honest note: what would you do differently, if anything?