Hellooo! 
So, I want to be more organized with my trades so I can easily look back on them. I do have a trading journal here, but it’s really where I spill my heart out whenever I’m trading so it’s not as organized and systematic as I want it to be. 
I’ve recently signed up for a MYFXBOOK account. It’s pretty detailed and it even tracks the most productive trading days for me. 
Would it make sense if I create a separate trading journal from this or do you guys think the myfxbook will suffice? Thank youuuuu!
A couple of things I learned in trading are that firstly you need to analyse your winning trades as deeply as you look at your losers.
Secondly, the trades you didn’t take are also important - maybe the set-ups which you missed, or the trades you couldn’t take because of over-exposure on this or that currency, or maybe the entry orders you cancelled before they triggered, plus the pyramids you didn’t use.
Also the position sizes you didn’t use - you may have decided to use a bigger or smaller position size for some trades and it could be useful to be able to look back later and understand why and what happened.
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I don’t know what myfxbook looks like. If you think it’ll be worth a shot, then go ahead. Try it, and see what happens.
If you need a type of journal that you can’t find, then just make one on excel or word. You can customize your own journal template, and even include before/after pictures for each trade.
How about you? Do YOU think it would make sense if you create a separate trading journal?
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It is a good question. Because of the different things I trade, all the time, I have found it impossible to use any commercial method of keeping track of my trades. I must have more than 10 “trading books”. I have suffered in the past from information overload. When I look at some of my journals from 15 years ago, I can’t even understand why I maintained the data fields I did, and have to refer to various tabs in spreadsheets to remind myself what I was trying to do at the time.
Since 2023 I have made a conscious attempt to simplify the amount and the detail of what I keep. Just because we have terabyte drives it doesn’t mean we need to fill them with garbage. The biggest trouble I have is with unstructured data.
My latest “strategy” involves a lot of temporary writing on lined A4 paper but I intend to throw all this stuff away on a monthly basis. It is a simple strategy that relies on maintaining only two wallets - both containing SOL crypto tokens. One is my offline wallet, the other is a wallet in which I only maintain SOL tokens (not many at all), and other SOL network based tokens that I trade via either Raydium or Jupiter. I can find at least 20 tokens a day to analyze. This evening I entered and exited 3 trades. the only record I intend to maintain is how many SOL was in the small account at the beginning of the day and how many SOL are in the account at the end of the trading day. I wish all my working life was so simple. Of course, I do need to continue to write the “rules” for this strategy, as I have done for other strategies I use. Since I started with trades involving just a few dollars each, I can afford to “fail often and fail fast” - a technique that is used in Agile project management, and encouraged by software development companies. I have been fortunate to allocate some of my recent profits to this accelerated and simplified approach. I generally advise new traders to do everything with paper trading, and indeed I paper traded this new strategy for a few days but found the volatility so high in trading meme coins that paper trading only served to speed up the mechanical actions of creating buy and sell orders more quickly. When the objective is to try to catch the odd 10X gain in a week, it is a false economy to worry about trading costs and slippage. One of my trades was a mistake from the start. I forgot to check whether its liquidity was locked or not. It was not. Without waiting I immediately exited the trade. Total cost of that error was $0.25. I got lucky, but when you are setting up a lot of rules on the fly, practice makes perfect.
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Thanks for these, Tom! Tbh, I haven’t been recording these items. I focus mainly on the ones that I do take but in hindsight, these are things I should’ve also included in my journal. Do you have separate journals for trades you took and those you didn’t? Thank youuuu!
For me, myfxbook is very detailed. But it focuses on the numbers. Your entries, your SL, etc and not really on the thinking behind the trades. 
There aren’t a lot of “descriptive” discussion on the process. 
Tbh, I would love to have separate journals. But there’s also the question of whether it’s efficient or a waste of time. 
Maintaining just 1 journal is already very time consuming.
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It must have been a lot of work maintaining all of those 10 trading books. I don’t think I have what it takes to be able to do that, but information overload is something that I’m also kinda concerned about since I tend to get overwhelmed by too much data (especially numbers) easily. Thanks for sharing this, Mondeo!
You shared that you simplified the process so you don’t take note of a lot of the details of each trade anymore. As much as I’d want to do this for myself, wouldn’t you say your ability to simplify your records comes from years and years of experience and knowledge you’ve gathered? Unfortunately, I’m not sure if I’m there yet.
I use the same spreadsheet for everything and the most important column is the name of the strategy I used for the trade - this makes everything else make sense.
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Thank youuu! I’m trying to make my own spreadsheet but everything’s just messy for now. I’m not the best at excel either. But I’ll incorporate the “name of the strategy” in my columns too, just in case I eventually decide to use multiple strategies at once. Thank youuuu! 
I have not thought about it and it doesn’t take a lot of work. I remember stuff by Job Numbers. Some of the very long jobs are part of a series that I call GRS (get rich slow 
) since all the predecessor GRQ (get rich quick) schemes failed.
Off by heart, I can recall some of the memorable ones.
Jobs J191 to J264 are UK investment properties, where I have an electronic and a paper folder for all documents associated with property investment. The oldest J191 started in 2003. Earlier than J191 include some properties that have done their full lifecycle, from buying date to selling date, and are archived in a “closed jobs” folder. When the paper files are 7 years old, they are thrown away (conforming with UK tax laws).
J275 is Forex Trading
J287 is GRS10 (get rich slow scheme number 10) that includes sub-folders for gold, silver, long term currency, crypto).
J287 Crypto is now split up into four strategies, and so on and so forth.
With a record keeping system that has not changed since 1999, there is some peace of mind that you can always find and reuse an idea for a new purpose.
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Then why not make your own template on MS Word? You can copy what your fxbook looks like, and ADD a descriptive box.
Once you make your template, you can just use it again and again. Wanna make a change? Then change whatever you want.
You can add boxes and grids to MS Word documents. Change the color, etc. Make it your own!