Hello swing traders!
In this post, I’d like to touch on the theme of trading journals, specifically for swing traders.
Sorry for the long post, I just had a lot to say. Hopefully, you’ll find it interesting.
Intro
I’m a software engineer and a swing trader. I prefer trading forex though sometimes I dip my toes into the volatile crypto market.
I am also a believer that every failure is a lesson that we can choose to learn from. Since swing traders don’t have that many trades, I thoroughly analyze each of my past trades to extract as much value as possible.
For those of you who are wondering what is a trading journal - it’s basically just a tool to record your trades so that you can analyze them later in order to improve as a trader. In its simplest form, it’s just a notebook with a pen. On the other side of the spectrum are online products that are designed specifically for this purpose.
Problem with the trading journals
That’s where I found some friction within my workflow. All of the existing online trading journals are primarily focused on day traders and thus it’s about statistical analysis rather than individual trade analysis. Although they offer some level of documentation in form of notes and screenshots, it’s really hard to analyze any particular trade, I find myself going back and forth trying to put the pieces together. The information is not really structured and I feel like fighting against it rather than using it to my benefit.
Solutions
So I went ahead to Google Sheets and created a few tables. As the functionality grew I had to add some code to make it more usable and automated. It worked until it didn’t. It was too time-consuming to enter trade details, and the code was becoming more complex and harder to test.
I realized that I gotta move on from Sheets. So I coded a simple web trading journal that would allow me to quickly add trades and see what mattered to me: documented trade events (entry, scale in, stop loss, etc), chartshots, conclusion (lessons learned), trade metrics, and reports. More importantly, a trade was structured in chronological sequence with details attached to every trade event. This allows me to “replay” the trade as it happened, and better understand and recall my thought process throughout the trade’s lifetime.
As I started extending functionality I realized that it would be cool to share this with other fellow traders. But the solution was coded from the beginning for “home use”, in other words, it wasn’t ready for public use.
Therefore, I started rewriting it to account for the missing features that I discovered when using it, as well as some architectural concerns that are of no interest to non-technical people.
My goal is to create a trading journal tailored for us, swing traders, where we would have the ability to thoroughly analyze our trades, and include as much information as we want so we could “replay” that trade when we’re out of the market and understand what we did good and where we fell short.
And that’s where I come to you guys seeking valuable opinions, on what a “perfect” journal for swing traders looks like to you. That’s why I’ve created a survey to gather your thoughts and opinions in a structured format.
I cannot include a link into a post, but the short link is: forms.gle followed by /yjoraYUqvCNUCC7B8
Your Reward
In return for your participation, I’d like to offer you early access to this trading journal and three months of service completely free of charge (unfortunately leaving it forever free is not feasible due to expenses associated with the development, maintenance, and hosting).
Your feedback will help me make this product better for you guys.
Thank you in advance for your time and support.
Swing traders are awesome and we deserve good tools to become the best version of ourselves.
Best regards,
Justin
