What to Include in a Trading Journal You Will Actually Keep

Most advice on what to include in a trading journal gives you a long list. Pair, session, setup, indicators, news, mood, sleep, lessons, and more. By week three, many traders have stopped writing anything at all.

The journal people quit is usually the one that asks too much. This article covers a smaller version. It has nine fields, and you write only three of them by hand. We also explain what research says about why recording and reviewing help, where that evidence is limited, and how to run a 15-minute weekly review.

Why most trading journals get dropped

A habit needs a small, repeatable action

Phillippa Lally and colleagues followed volunteers who tried to build one new daily habit, such as drinking water with lunch. It took a median of 66 days for the behaviour to feel automatic, with a very wide range of 18 to 254 days (Lally and colleagues, 2010, European Journal of Social Psychology). Simple actions such as drinking water tended to become automatic sooner than exercise. Missing a single day did not seriously set people back.

This was a small study of everyday health habits, not trading. Still, it gives two useful ideas for a journal. Make the entry small, and tie it to the same moment every time, for example right after a trade closes. If you miss one entry, carry on with the next one.

Every extra field is one more reason to skip

After a good trade, you may feel like writing a lot. After a loss, at the end of a work day, a 20-field form is the first thing to go. That is exactly the trade you most need on record. A short journal you fill in every time will tell you more than a long one you fill in after winners only.

Why a journal is worth keeping at all

Recording progress tends to help

Benjamin Harkin and colleagues pooled 138 experiments on progress monitoring. People who were helped to track their progress reached their goals more often, with a small-to-medium effect. The effect was larger when the information was physically recorded (Harkin and colleagues, 2016, Psychological Bulletin). Many of these studies were about health goals, such as diet and exercise. Nobody has shown the same effect for trading, so treat this as a reasonable starting point.

Memory rewrites trades after the fact

In a classic study, Baruch Fischhoff found that once people knew an outcome, they believed they would have predicted it (Fischhoff, 1975, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance). This is hindsight bias. After a winning trade, the setup feels obvious. After a loser, the warning signs feel clear. A note and a screenshot from the moment of entry show what you actually knew then.

A good result can hide a bad decision

Jonathan Baron and John Hershey showed that people rate the same decision as better when it happens to turn out well (Baron and Hershey, 1988, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). In trading this is outcome bias. A trade that broke your rules and won still broke your rules. One field in your journal, "Did I follow my plan?", keeps the decision apart from the result.

What to include in a trading journal: the nine-field minimum

Split the fields into two groups. The first six are facts. Your platform already knows most of them, so you can copy them from the trade history or have a tool record them. The last three are judgments, and only you can write those.

The facts (copy or record them)

1. Entry and exit times. Record both, in one time zone. Mixing broker time and local time will confuse your reviews.
2. Market and direction. For example, EUR/USD buy.
3. Entry, stop loss, target and exit prices. Write the stop you planned at entry, and note it if the stop moved.
4. Lot size and risk. The lot, and the risk as a percentage of your account. If you are not sure how lot size follows from your stop, our position size calculator shows the maths.
5. Result in money and in R. Use the net result, after commission and swap, or your numbers will look better than they are. R is the result divided by the amount you planned to risk. A loss at your planned stop is -1R. A win at twice your risk is +2R. R lets you compare trades of different sizes.
6. A screenshot at entry and at exit. This is the field people skip most, and it is the one that shows what you saw at the time.

The judgments (write them yourself)

7. The reason, in one sentence. "Price came back to last week's high and formed a lower high on the hourly chart." If you cannot write it in one sentence, that is useful information too.
8. Plan followed: yes or no. If no, write what changed. "Moved the stop." "Entered before the candle closed." "Doubled the lot."
9. One word for how you felt. Calm, bored, rushed, angry, hopeful. Naming a feeling may also help you manage it. In one brain-imaging study, putting a feeling into words reduced activity in the amygdala, a region linked to emotional reactions (Lieberman and colleagues, 2007, Psychological Science). That was a lab study, so read it as a hint, not proof. If the word is "angry" or "desperate", read how to stop revenge trading. If it is "rushed" or "excited", read FOMO trading.

When most of the facts are recorded for you, the three written fields take about a minute. That is small enough to do after a bad trade.

What to leave out, for now

Leave out anything you will not review, such as long market commentary, scores for ten emotions or every indicator value. They add time without adding much you will use.

Add a field only when your weekly review raises a question it would answer. If you suspect you trade worse in the New York session, add a session column for a few weeks. If you trade two setups and want to compare them, add a setup name. Then drop the field again once you have your answer.

The weekly review: 15 minutes, once a week

Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano and Bradley Staats ran experiments where some people spent time at the end of a task writing down what they had learned. Others spent the same time practising more. The reflection groups tended to do better on later rounds (Di Stefano and colleagues, "Learning by Thinking", SSRN working paper). These were mostly short lab and workplace tasks, and the paper is a working paper, so the size of the effect in trading is unknown.

Once a week, at a set time:

1. Count how often you followed your plan. For example, 8 of 11 trades.
2. Compare the two groups. Average R for trades where you followed the plan, and for trades where you did not.
3. Look at the screenshots of your two worst trades. Ask what you would do the same and what you would change.
4. Read your feeling words. Do certain words come before rule breaks?
5. Write one if-then rule for next week. "If I have closed a loss, then I wait 20 minutes before the next order." If-then plans, also called implementation intentions, had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals in a meta-analysis of 94 studies (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology).

A note of caution. A week of 10 or 20 trades says very little about whether a method works, because results that small can easily be luck. What a week of entries can show you is behaviour: how often you follow your rules and what tends to come before a break. Judge the method over many weeks. This idea of looking at batches is also covered in loss aversion in trading.

An example entry

Here are two made-up entries to show the format. They are not real account data.

Trade 1. EUR/USD buy. Entry at market, 20-pip stop, 40-pip target (2R). Risk 1%. Closed at the stop, -1R. Reason: "Pullback to support on the hourly chart after a daily uptrend." Plan followed: yes. Feeling: calm.

Trade 2. EUR/USD buy, 30 minutes later. Same 1% risk at entry. Stop moved from 20 to 40 pips during the trade. Closed at the new stop, -2R. Reason: "Same idea, price looked cheaper." Plan followed: no, moved the stop and re-entered quickly. Feeling: annoyed.

The first trade was a normal loss. The second cost twice as much: -2R against -1R. On the weekly review, the rule break came straight after a loss, and the feeling word was a warning sign. That points to a clear if-then rule for next week.

When your journal shows more than a bad week

Sometimes a journal shows a pattern that is hard to look at, such as chasing losses again and again, hiding losses from people close to you, or feeling anxious or low about trading. If that sounds familiar, please talk to a licensed mental health professional or a gambling support service such as BeGambleAware.

A short checklist

After every trade:

• [ ] The facts are recorded (times, market, prices, size, risk, net result, screenshots).
• [ ] I wrote the reason in one sentence.
• [ ] I marked whether I followed my plan.
• [ ] I wrote one word for how I felt.

Once a week:

• [ ] I counted plan-followed trades.
• [ ] I compared R for followed and not-followed trades.
• [ ] I looked at my two worst screenshots.
• [ ] I wrote one if-then rule for next week.

Final thought

The best trading journal is the one you still fill in after a losing day. Keep the facts complete, keep your written part to three short lines, and spend 15 minutes a week reading it back. Add a field only when a real question needs it.

Discipline Guard can record many of these facts on your MT4 chart. Its journal saves a chart screenshot when each trade opens and closes and keeps journal times in the time zone you choose. It also builds weekly and monthly reports. You write the reason and the feeling. It never opens a trade unless you press one of its buttons. It runs on MT4 for Windows (computer or VPS), not on the phone app.