What to Record in a Trading Journal
A journal is only as useful as the fields you capture. Too little and your reviews are guesswork; too much and you stop journaling. Here is the balanced set of data points that make reviews genuinely useful, split into the objective facts and the subjective context.
Objective trade data (capture this automatically)
This is the factual record of what happened. If your journal syncs from your platform, all of it is captured for you with no room for selective memory:
- Instrument, direction, and date/time of entry and exit.
- Entry price, exit price, stop-loss, and take-profit levels.
- Position size and the resulting risk in currency and in R.
- Outcome in R-multiples, plus fees and swap where relevant.
- Duration in the trade and maximum adverse/favorable excursion if available.
Subjective context (add this yourself)
The objective data tells you what; the subjective layer tells you why — and that is what makes patterns fixable. Add:
- The setup or strategy name (so you can measure expectancy per setup).
- Your reason for the trade in one sentence.
- A confidence rating (1–5) taken at entry, before you know the outcome.
- Your emotional state — calm, rushed, revenge, bored, FOMO.
- A chart screenshot at entry, and ideally at exit.
- A one-line, honest note on execution quality, separate from the P&L.
Tags that make reviews searchable
Freeform notes are hard to analyze in bulk. A small, consistent set of tags turns your journal into something you can filter and aggregate. Tag mistakes (“moved stop,” “no plan,” “oversized”), conditions (“news,” “trend,” “range”), and sessions (“London,” “NY”). Then a weekly review is one filter away from telling you which mistake is costing you the most.
Frequently asked questions
What is the single most important field to log?
Outcome in R-multiples and the setup name. Together they let you calculate expectancy per strategy — the number that tells you what to do more of and what to cut.
Should I record my emotional state?
Yes. Emotional tags are how you discover that, say, most of your worst trades happen when you're trading to 'get back' a loss. You can't fix a pattern you never wrote down.