A trading journal works only if you fill it in the same way after every trade and read it once a week. Here is the minimum that gives a benefit.
What to record for every trade:
- Instrument, direction, entry and exit time.
- Entry, stop, target and risk as a percentage of the account (how to size a lot from risk: position size).
- The setup: which rule you entered on. If there is no rule, write it as it is: "no signal".
- The result in R, meaning fractions of risk. Money changes with position size, R does not.
- A chart screenshot and one line about your state: calm, rushed, revenge-trading.
Five metrics are enough:
- Win rate together with average R. A 40% win rate with a 2R average win beats 70% with a 3R loss.
- Expectancy per trade (average R). A positive number means the system is in profit.
- Profit factor: total profit divided by total loss.
- Maximum drawdown and the longest losing streak. What to do about them: drawdown recovery math.
- Slices: by instrument, time of day and setup. Often one slice makes all the profit and the others eat it.
A 30-minute weekly review:
- Mark the three most expensive mistakes of the week and their common cause.
- Find the trades "off plan" and count how much R they cost.
- Write one rule for next week. One, not ten.
Typical mistakes: recording only winning trades, counting in money instead of R, changing the journal fields every week, keeping a journal but never rereading it. A loss is not the enemy, it is the price of information: why a loss is a bill for information.
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Need your own journal, a report or an indicator for your system? Tell me the task: kovalev.trade/development
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