I was inspired by watching a video on how Hannah (from YT channel Hannah Forex) uses Notion as a trade journal.
Looked more into Notion and realised how powerful it was as an organiser, planner and just overall workflow. I found it can be used for automating a lot of administrative functions and keeps everything I need in one workspace. For e.g. You should be able to automate Entries in your Trade Journal for a review 2 months later and have that reminder display in your workspace.
If anyone has experience in working on Notion to improve your tasks/workflow I’d love to hear about it. I’ve only used it for 2 days so far and here’s what I was able to do so far. It’s still a version 1.0 and I need to learn more about notion to implement other ideas I have on the backburner.
My Workspace: This can still use a lot of improvement. On the backburner for now.
Currency Pairs checklist: This has a lot of work to do. Like how to make this into a daily checklist/snapshot and incorporating it into the trading journal for the day. These are just some of the ideas I can think of for now.
This was a great idea for the kind of beginner than I am. Including trading systems in a table format with attributes/properties that can be further filtered. All consolidated in one workspace for quick reference when needed.
Hi,
I have never used Notion but I have reasonable experience using Microsoft Teams (planner) where you can set up tasks or lists of tasks and get automated reminders. Over the years, I have found that there are no perfect solutions out there for many routines that could be automated, and I always find myself reverting back to Excel workbooks to maintain track of events. Of course, when the trades are live, I try to maintain as much information within the trading package as I can to avoid duplication where possible.
How you described using Microsoft teams is exactly what I’m trying to emulate. Trying to automate a lot of the admin work and enable routine building. By keeping as much information within trading package do you mean as in news, and perhaps even journaling on the trading platform? Sorry, if obvious. I’m still very, very new.
My two biggest use cases at the moment are:
The ability to review my trades after a specific time, say 2 months later, and append observations and result snapshots to it. An alert on dash during login is doable too. I haven’t figured it out yet.
Consolidate files in one workspace.
Word documents = book related notes, random notes, setups, trading plan)
While these are the most pressing issues for me there are few other nice to have workflows.
At the same time Notion has disadvantages:
There are concerns about data security, so ideally nothing sensitive stored (everthing in notion is saved online).
Graphing is almost non existent (apparently through another website). Convoluted.
For the overwhelmed newbie, like me, Notion has far more advantages than disadvantages at the moment. But data privacy is a cause for concern and I will be keeping an eye out for similar alternatives.
You have made an excellent start here. One word of advice, and this relates to something I set up last year for Crypto where I had a few “unknown unknowns” to deal with. Try to get the full lifecycle done as soon as you can - by journalling whilst trading on demo account, and get used to appending observations as soon as practicable after closing each trade (not two months later). You may find, once this becomes a routine, that you will not have to go back and append (unless of course you trade duration is 2 months). I applied an Agile methodology to this. Fail fast, change tack, fail fast again. It is the quickest way to become comfortable with a new topic that has so many unknown moving parts. If you lose $100K on a demo account, it is no big deal. You can always start over again. But if you wait until everything is perfect, you may never end up trading real money.
That’s something I tend to do (or overdo). I’ve heard of it but don’t know of the Agile methodology. Can still relate to the “get to it and learn as you stumble” mentality though. Thanks
Mistook it for a PMP concept when you brought it up. I remember hearing a lot of about it when I worked in corporate alongside IT/PMP folks. Believe they were also switching to or alternating with another method (SCRUM) at the time. I’ll look it up in more detail later (also earmarked some reading in Economics and Statistics).
In the meanwhile, I created a sub workspace for back-testing stuff. Made a few improvements/changes there, but I’ve stopped focusing on Notion as a tool for now. It’s decent enough to work with. Will be focusing on back-testing stuff 80-90% of the time now. Here’s how it looks.
Only ever used Notion for manual note storage. So for reference and historical purposes. Nothing automated, Didn’t actually know that was possible.
On the trade journaling, I know it’s old, and haven’t looked at it recently, but have you ever considered checking out myfxbook.com? Not so much for sharing with others, but for your personal trading record? You can get monthly performance reports and some advanced stats related to your trading.
To be honest I had the longest misconception that using myfxbook was for flexing. About a week back saw some scr shots of graphs being generated so I’ll really curious about the online journals available. Graphing is almost non existent in Notion atm.
I’d also registered for a tradervue account (free version I think has 100 entries / month?), which I decided to try during forward testing. I should do the same with myfxbook.
I did some functional changes to the Notion trade journal. Like being able to tie setups names to my setups table and use some excel like formulas to calculate pip values and R. I didn’t know if I could do it initially but it’s more flexible than I thought.
Found another use for Notion, atleast in my case. One of the first books I’d read was Steve Nison’s '91 edition of Japanese candlestick charting techniques. I’d made a cheat sheet for the patterns in a word doc at the time.
I meant to make Anki cards later (just started using it for memory retention), while reading a more updated book. It makes sense to tabulate it and set it up like a board (as I did with the reading list). Not a pressing issue for now. I’ll keep it for either forward testing or live trading; to keep me from staring at the charts all day long
So, yeah across all of my tasks, I’ve been using notion for job management, paperwork, notes making, and so on. It may be targeted to a more professional audience, but I believe it is very insightful. As they say, it’s ideal for trade journaling and even free to use for private use.
Honestly the first time I heard of it was when I saw it being used as a forex journal in this video and I figured there must be other people using it too (hence this post). Only found out how powerful and extensively it’s used by other folks for just their day to day work and organizing. Fascinating how folks have adopted it for their day to day routines.
I’m not looking at improving it at the moment but as I use it more frequently I’m only getting newer and newer ideas that I want to try out. It’s a bit of a deviation from wanting to get better at trading though LOL.
Decided to see how the currency checklist held up against all 28 pairs. I’m personally finding it extremely useful to identify pairs that meet my goals. Didn’t think of expanding it beyond the USD pairs initially but I thought of giving it a try against the checklist yesterday and it worked wonders for me. The filter clears to list automatically for tomorrow’s data.
Added the data manually, which is a bit tedious. I’ll probably learn how to code in MQL5 to export a .csv or .txt to get for this high level overview in Notion or Excel. Not high priority atm.
It was a steep learning curve and it wasn’t easy for me. So far it’s proved to be really useful though because I have everything I need in one workspace. Not having to juggle between multiple word docs and excel files is a plus. Having access to the reference material for a quick review when I need it is useful (since I’m still a newbie).
The trade journal has been really powerful because I’m able to tabulate it like excel but attach screenshots of what I saw before trade. Analyzing trades post execution is also easy. Also noticed that while going through the motions of filling data into both journal and currency checklist I reverse a few bad decisions and keep a lot of impulse decision making at bay. Still haven’t tried tradervue or myfxbook and I could just ditch this whole journal idea if I find them better options.
The checklist I thought would be a great initial use to build discipline to study and understand the currency pairs I was working with (wanted to focus on EURUSD, USDJPY, GBPUSD & AUDUSD at first). While using it I quickly realised how it can be used as a screener to determine trending currencies (intend to trend trade only for now) for the 28 pairs. Also thinking of applying it to exotic pairs if I’m able to code the MQL5 csv export.
What challenges did you face? There’s a good chance, I reckon, I’m overlooking some very obvious disadvantages being a newbie.
Edit: Just realised the checklist works for me because I intend to swing or trade intraday. I can’t imagine it being useful for a scalper at all.
The currency checklist was initially included as a novelty. A not so necessary addition included to help build a routine for daily analysis. It’s evolved to something like a screener.
The first draft had raw data for the 28 major pairs. It was there in the workspace to remind me I had to capture data when it became blank (filter set to previous day). Two major changes:
Default view updated to two table views against strong trends and ranges.
Lot more derivations (OHLC data replaced by derivations I find useful and different views for both tables)
I’m not happy I’m getting that many currencies still. Lots of refining to be done over time. Still better than default view and omitting candidates from stricter filters for the moment.
Also created a table for implied options volatilities. Historic data isn’t readily available so I thought I’d capture and upload a csv to the notion table on a daily basis. Novelty item for analysis later down the road. Will get rid of it it’s pointless later.
Economic calendar data is populated in MT5. I can use that to import news events in Notion for a more methodical approach for the analysis of that data. Thought I’d have to wait till I learnt python to scrape online data. Good to know I can do it sooner if needed.
On a personal note I decided against importing exotic pairs for now. Trading’s already difficult with 28 pairs…
Currency Analysis/Forecast table created. Table stores the analysis of currency pairs that were shortlisted wit the help of the Currency Checklist.
Key data like trend direction, projected pip movement & forecast day stored in separate data fields. Also has alerts to remind user to review analysis at later date. Relationship built to Currency Checlkist enables migrating some of the fields to front page and assists in the calculation of a “Projected Target”.
There’s more room for improvement still. For e.g. automate review dates and set for immediate review if projected trend changes or price overshoots target prematurely.
Just found out how date reminders work in Notion after I implemented them in my currency analysis. It basically fires alerts that you can view from anywhere in your Notion workspace.
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