Keeping trade history after 30 day demo account expires

Trading Discussion
1

I’ve been trading a demo account which expires after a month and I need to open a new account to continue trading which causes my trading history and open trades information to be lost each month.

What simple ways can I keep track of my trades after my account expires so I can keep an ongoing record of my demo trading and allow open trades to continue so I can properly evaluate my strategy?

2

Hi Shinyhead,

probably the easiest way to keep track of older positions is having a trade journal which includes details of each trade as well as some short remarks, describing why you took the trade et cetera.

I’d advise every trader to to this, regardless of whether a demo or live account is being used, since a journal provides useful and essential info, thus assisting traders in evaluating the effectiveness of their trading strategy/plan.

While there are several websites offering trading journals, personally I have found it most effective to create my own, using Excel.
The spreadsheet contains several data colums (date, time, instrument, lot size, duration, opening price, stop loss, take profit, result et cetera) as well as space for some comments.

This way, I have information about every single trade I have ever opened, as well as the reason why I did what I did.
Analyzing these data (especially the comments) can greatly assist you in avoiding mistakes in the future, thus making you a more profitable trader.

If you are not good at creating excel files and using the correct formulae to make them automatically give you sums, averages et cetera, google ‘excel forex trade journal’ and you’ll find many downloadable templates.

Cheers,
Paladin

3

Go ahead and print out the MT4 statement. You should have a record of all your trades. But as paladin says, you need to keep a trading journal so that you can record more details about each trade.

4

…easiest way to extract the trade log from MT4 is open th Terminal (CTRL+T), click Account History, right click anywhere in there and then Save as Report or Save as Detailed Report if you want a little graph of your progress.