Greetings everyone!
I hope this question can be helpful to beginners like me.
I’m looking for a good template to start my trading journal. My hunch is that starting with the right documentation habits will help me be disciplined from the get go.
Is it a Google Sheets, .xlsx file or plain old pen and paper? Whatever the medium, what I’m looking for is a template for an orderly and well structured document that pins down the right information.
Many thanks!
Well I write down my stuff manually on my journal or take screenshots. This is what I usually write.
-Whatever pairs I’m looking at
-What important market data/reports are coming out
-My strategy/my own sentiment of why I am placing a potential trade
-Buy/Sell Points, SL, TP & any lower bound/upper bound I might be using.
-I usually then have weekly sum-ups of how the trades went/how was the market reacting to certain news.
Here’s a snapshot of mine from 2008
It wont be ideal for anyone to copy as it’s geared around the variables that I consider important and that I’ve chosen to use.
Once you have these quantifiable variables yourself you can include them into your journal. This way you can fully quantity each and every trade; that’s where the real fun begins from an analytical point of view
Sheesh I haven’t even got that detailed yet. You’re about to make me go revamp my book for the end of the year.
it’s quite useful really, then you can play around with all sorts of analysis and charts
like modelling outcomes…
and simple charting overviews
I guess the only limits are those of your excel skills?
I have excellent excels skills but I swear it never crossed my mind to use excel.
I’ve been writing it out for the last 3 years, but you’re right I could analyze so much faster & more efficiently on an excel sheet. I can use the find function to correlate previous price points and what not.
True - I also found this simple colour coding useful
A few glasses of wine and everything looks great…
Check this thread…
EDIT:
You can start from here and make modifications to suit your style, I think it’s a great start. You don’t even need any experience in Excel, just Google what you are looking for and boom!!!
Oh I like the zip. Very nice - I’m going to either start this December by putting them in excel sheets actually.
@BaconSandwich: absolutely awesome. I had something along those lines in mind, but the level of detail you bring to it is certainly inspiring. “Just a written log” won’t give me the tools for numerical analysis I need to make objective hindsight judgements, but the excel sheet will do it.
Being new here, I’m still learning the ropes of the Babypips etiquette, so here’s a bold demand, let me know if its excessive: would it be possible to share the excel document with us, without the data? It’s probably way more than my current needs, but a jewel to start with. Thanks either way!
@momoisnyc and @Maximus_martins: thank you very much as well!
^^Definitely download that trade journal @maximus_martins left. It’s a gem honestly and it’s already has the functions written so you just have to plug in your details and you’re good to go mate!
It’s not bad actually, definitely a good starting point before you start to drill down into what you really want.
Don’t follow me then - I’m always getting slaps on the wrist for being too blunt 
It is quite important to aviod the “overloading” of your trading journal with the information, otherwise the process of filling it would be so time-consuming, that you would stop doing this. Try to determine the necessary information, which is important for you.
@J_C_Anderson It’s pretty much the conclusion I came to after perusing the examples I was so generously provided with. My goal was to zoom in on what was “necessary” in a journal, but aside from the few elements I’ll be starting with, the rest is pretty much related to one’s trading approach and therefore somewhat personal.
What’s key here, and it really is, because you will have to do it all again if you don’t get it right, is that each and every element about your trade has to be quantifiable. What I mean by this is that you must be able to define a parameter for each trade, a way to measure each variable that is constant. This can’t be down to personal opinion. Basically if you gave your trading ‘rules’ to me or anyone else and we filled out your journal we would all have the same data, none of it can be discretionary.
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“Quantitative information or data is based on quantities obtained using a quantifiable measurement process. In contrast, qualitative information records qualities that are descriptive, subjective or difficult to measure. Quantitative may refer to: … Numerical data, also known as quantitative data”
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So put the ground work in, really think about what you want to record and why - forgetting a variable now will just frustrate you when you have to re-visit each and every trade to obtain the data. I’m not talking about variables such as the currency pair, entry and exit time and the price. Look at factors that perhaps effect where you enter, what stop level you use, what TP level you use, what the output is of any indicators you use prior to entering the trade, are you using moving average (is price below or above when entering the long or short trade), what does the higher time frame suggest on the same SMA from a bias point of view. Are you using an ATR, how much of a typical daily move has taken place before you go for a retrace or continuation (express this as a ratio perhaps). This sort of data can’t be faked, it is what it is on the chart, on your chart and my chart.
I don’t advocate using loads of indicators either, it just becomes a mess and keeping it simple is key. But one advantage to indicators, both on and off the chart, is that they quantify the data for you and the output is already numercial. It makes it easy to find relationships between the trades you really want and the trades you really don’t.
When you’ve got that completed you can really start to look at all winning and losing trades - what do they have in common from all the data that you’ve collected? That’s where you really start to leverage up your trading ability because you instantly have proof and not a hunch. You’ve got statistics showing you the correlation (this will give you confidence too).
The only problem here is that it kinda comes down to the saying “what came first, the egg or the chicken”…
…it’s not easy to build a decent trading journal without having a decent trading approach, without the approach you wont know what variables to record in your journal, and without the journal you wont know if your trading approach is actually decent, see?
So expect trial and error - but I can promise you that in the long term this will be the most reliable and important piece of work you will have done. It takes time, but if you really want to develop what works for you then this is the approach i’d suggest. You’ll learn a lot along the way.
@BaconSandwich I couldn’t agree more. What I meant by “somewhat personal” refered to the specific agregation of indicators that one considers as valid signal providers. My idea about keeping a journal in the first place is to gather enough data so as to eventually be in a position to calculate valid correlations, statistics and probabilities and establish my trades thereupon, instead of relying on intuition. (A good book I recommend about not trusting one’s intuitions in the trading field is Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. )
But I dig you when you say “chicken and egg”; I was reluctant to use the expression… I guess fumbling in the dark is part of learning the ropes.
One approach that I took - and actually now always start with, is to look at perhaps a 4H chart, it’s a big enough time frame to isolate the majority of the noise that occurs on lower time frames. Go through the chart and keep scrolling through time whilst marking out where you’d have “loved” to have been in a long or short position; because it would have been really profitable, right!
Start to reverse engineer a trading approach based on these data points, what do they have in common, that’s the golden question. When you find the answer (a majority answer that is, it’s still going to be a grey area) to that you can really start to build a solid foundation.
So yea, going backwards actually has it’s advantages and avoids “fumbling around in the dark” as you’re most certainly focusing on the key areas that are of interest!
wow! hat off
With target & projections and all, that’s really a pro!
Thanks for sharing this; i might want to adopt this concept.
ps/ Still trading on free time tho…
Hi there , interesting discussion thank you,
I am also new to this 6 months on a demo and 2 months live , i still keep my demo account open as well running them side by side for the moment to clarify a few things. I am now only doing the daily chart.
I don’t go around recommending people. But i did find this guys blog channel the other day and it is very honest and inspiring. This particular link answers your question in a very simple way. I have now listened to all the pod casts. He is has also highly recommend baby pips
cheers from the UK .
