How to keep a trading journal, step by step

Most trading journals die in the second week because they ask for too much at the wrong moment. A useful one asks for a few things before the trade, almost nothing during it, and a short honest note after it.

A journal records decisions, not just results

Your broker statement already records results: what you bought, where you closed, what it paid. What it cannot record is why you took the trade, what you planned to do and whether you did it. That is the part a journal exists for. When you later ask 'is my London breakout model worth keeping' or 'do I lose money when I move my stop', the answer has to come from decisions written down at the time, not from memory reconstructed after a bad week. Memory is reliable about how a trade felt and unreliable about almost everything else. So the goal of every entry is simple: leave enough of a trail that a stranger could reread the trade a month later and tell whether it followed your own plan. If an entry cannot answer that, it is a P/L log with extra steps.

Before the trade: write the plan in one line

Before you click, record the instrument, direction, the model or idea you are trading, entry, stop and target, and the risk in both percent and money. A worked example: a $10,000 account risking 0.5% means $50 on the line. If the stop on EURUSD is 25 pips and a pip is worth $10 per standard lot, the size is 0.2 lots, because 25 × $10 × 0.2 = $50. With a target 50 pips away, the planned reward to risk is 2:1. Writing this down takes under a minute and does two jobs. It forces you to size from the stop rather than from a feeling, and it creates the baseline you will later compare the actual outcome against. If you cannot fill in the stop or the reason, that is useful information too: it usually means the trade is an impulse, not a plan.

During the trade: log only deviations

While the position is open, resist the urge to narrate. Price ticking up and down is not information worth keeping. What is worth keeping is any change to the plan you wrote before entry: the stop moved, a partial close, a target pulled in, an add to the position. For each one, write the time and one reason in plain words, for example 'moved stop to breakeven after 1R because the candle closed back inside the range'. These notes are the most valuable data in the whole journal, because they are where discretion lives. After a few dozen trades you can sum the outcome of every trade where you moved the stop and compare it with the ones where you left it alone. That comparison is impossible without the notes, and it often settles arguments you have been having with yourself for months.

After the trade: outcome, R and one honest line

Within a few minutes of closing, while it is still fresh, fill in the result. Record net P/L in money after commission, then the same result in R: P/L divided by the risk you planned. In the example above, closing at the target pays $100, which is +2R; getting stopped out costs $50, which is -1R; a stop that slipped to $65 is -1.3R. Add a screenshot of the chart at exit next to the one at entry. Then answer one yes or no question, did I follow my plan, and write a single sentence about what you would repeat or avoid. Tag the emotion only if it changed what you did. The yes or no field is the one traders skip most often and the one that later explains the most, because it separates bad trades from bad outcomes.

Consistency beats detail

A journal with eight fields filled on every trade is worth far more than one with thirty fields filled when you felt like it. Two rules keep it consistent. First, log every trade, including the revenge trade and the one you closed in a panic, because a journal that only holds the trades you are comfortable with produces flattering statistics that are wrong. Second, keep a fixed vocabulary for models, sessions and mistake tags. If the same idea is called 'NY reversal' on Monday and 'reversal New York' on Thursday, every split you run later quietly breaks in two. Write the list of allowed names once and pick from it. A dedicated tool helps here simply because it offers the same fields every time; in Haunted, for instance, models, sessions and tags are picked from your own lists, and the journal is free, so the cost of trying the habit is only the minute per trade.

The weekly routine that makes it pay off

Entries only become useful when you read them back, so book a fixed slot once a week, around forty-five minutes. Start by checking that every trade is logged and has a result in R. Then look at the totals: number of trades, net R, win rate and the average result per trade. Split the week by model and by session to see where the result actually came from. Count the trades where you answered 'no' to following the plan and add up what they cost in R. Reread the screenshots of your best and worst two trades. Finish by writing exactly one change for next week, phrased as a rule you can check, such as 'no entries in the first fifteen minutes after the New York open'. Next week, the first thing you review is whether you kept it.

Should a trading journal be on paper or digital?

Paper is good for thinking before a trade, but it is poor at the part that matters later: filtering and summing. Once you want results by model, by session or by month, you need data you can sort. Many traders sketch the plan by hand and still log the fields digitally.

How many trades before the journal tells me anything?

There is no magic number, but a handful of trades mostly shows noise. Treat a few dozen trades per model as the point where patterns start to be worth discussing, and keep treating conclusions as provisional. The process notes, such as rule breaks, become useful much sooner than the statistics.

Should I journal demo and backtest trades too?

Yes, but keep them separate from live trades. Backtest and demo results are useful for testing a model, yet they behave differently from live execution, where slippage and emotion enter. Mixing them into one set of statistics makes your live numbers look better or worse than they are.

Is there a free trading journal I can use?

Haunted is a free trading journal that runs in the browser on desktop and phone. You enter trades manually or import them from CSV or Notion, and it builds the analytics, including expectancy, drawdown and results by session and model. It does not sync with brokers automatically.