Important things to note on a trading journal

Beginner Questions
1

I know this has been asked already and it’s also discussed in the school. But in your own experience, what are the most important things that I need to put on my trading journal?

2

I think losing trade and why its lose

3

Interesting to note and review the trades you decided not to take and what happened to them.

Always worth looking at what happened to price after you exited a position.

4

Or if you made trades you weren’t supposed to out of greed or FOMO (which really, is still greed haha).

5

I know what you mean purtle but a greedy or fearful trade is automatically outside the rules of a strategy (any strategy) so nothing much to learn of value there. I could have been more clear - what I mean was the trades that didn’t break the rules of the strategy but you decided not to take anyway.

6

Ahh yes, makes sense.

7

Your trading plan for the day BEFORE you start trading.

8

Thanks! When you do this, do you feel it helps to not make the same mistake again?

9

Thanks @tommor! I really appreciate it. Do you think if I do this it won’t make me focus too much on missed opportunities? Or maybe it’s just something personal like it could work out that way for me because of how I am and it’s different for others?

10

Thanks @James.F! Yeah I think I need to visually drill my plan for the day to “Plan the trade. Trade the plan.”

11

The missed opportunities can be important too.

For example, if an opportunity meets 4 of your 5 criteria you might not take it, but by focusing on the trades you did not take, you might find that that 5th criterion is unimportant. You might also find that 3 out of 4 is good enough.

Also, traders like to say this pattern or that pattern has a say 70% win rate. But that might be just 70% of the trades with that pattern which they took. If you counted all the occurrences of that pattern, the real win rate of the pattern might be only 40%…

1 Like
12

exactly

“patterns” and “indicators” don’t “have win rates” - it’s meaningless

in fact, without precisely defining entries AND targets AND stop-loss, nothing “has a win rate”

i think this stuff about win rates has grown indirectly out the belief that higher win rates are somehow better than lower win rates, which isn’t even true in the first place

why so many people seem to believe all this rubbish is beyond my understanding …

2 Likes