How to Keep a Trading Journal (What to Actually Track)
The difference between traders who improve and traders who just churn their accounts usually isn’t strategy — it’s a trading journal. Without one, every trade is a one-off you forget by next week; with one, your trades become data you can learn from. A journal turns “I think I trade better in the mornings” into something you can actually check. Here’s exactly what to record and how to use it.
This is an educational tracking tool, not financial advice.
What to log on every trade
For each trade, capture the numbers that let you analyze it later:
- Date and ticker — what you traded and when.
- Direction — long or short.
- Entry and exit price — where you got in and out.
- Position size — how many shares/contracts.
- Stop-loss and target — where you planned to exit before you entered.
- Result — your profit or loss, in dollars and as a percentage.
- Setup / strategy — the pattern or reason you took the trade (breakout, pullback, earnings, etc.).
These fields let you answer the questions that matter: which setups actually make money, whether you’re cutting losers and letting winners run, and what your real win rate is.
The mindset column most people skip
The numbers tell you what happened; a short notes column tells you why — and it’s where the real edge hides. After each trade, jot a line on your state of mind and discipline:
- Did you follow your plan, or improvise?
- Were you calm, or chasing / revenge-trading after a loss?
- Did you size correctly, or oversize because you “felt sure”?
Over a few weeks, patterns jump out — the account damage clusters around the trades where you broke your own rules, not around a bad strategy. That’s the single most valuable thing a journal reveals.
Manage risk before you manage profit
Good journaling starts before the trade: decide your position size from your stop, not your gut. Risk a small, fixed percentage of your account per trade, and let the distance to your stop set how big the position is. Logging your intended stop and size next to the actual result is how you catch the slow drift into oversizing that blows up accounts.
Review it — the part that makes you better
A journal you never reread is just a diary. Once a week, sort by setup and by result and look for the truth in the numbers: your most profitable setup, your most expensive habit, your win rate by strategy. Then make one adjustment for the coming week. That review loop — log, review, adjust, repeat — is the whole point.
Grab the free trading journal
Ready to start? Our free Trading Journal gives you the core log — record each trade and see your results add up.
For the full system, the Trading Journal + Risk Calculator adds a position-size and risk calculator, a rules & mindset discipline tab, and a live performance dashboard with your equity curve and win rate, in Google Sheets and Excel, light and dark.
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