What to log on every trade
The handful of fields that make a journal useful, and the ones you can skip.
A journal is only as good as what you can learn from it later. Prices and profit are recorded for you when your account syncs. Your job is to add the context a broker cannot see.
The essentials
- Setup: the pattern or reason you entered, from a short list you reuse.
- Plan: entry, stop and target before you click buy or sell.
- Mistakes: anything you did that broke your own rules.
- One line of notes: what you saw and how you felt.
Keep it fast
If logging takes ten minutes a trade, you will stop doing it. Aim for under a minute: pick tags, write one sentence, attach a screenshot if the chart tells the story better than words.
Write notes as soon as the trade closes. Memory rewrites losing trades within hours, and the honest version is the useful one.