What should you write in a trading journal?
Less than you think, and about your execution rather than your profit. Most journals die in three weeks because they ask for an essay a day. The version that survives is short: what you planned, what you actually did, a grade for the decision quality, and the state you were in while making it. The market conditions do not need typing out, because they can be attached automatically.
Based on the same process behind every Library report. How we test.
Grade the decision, not the outcome
This is the single change that makes a journal useful. A disciplined day that followed your plan and still lost money is an A day. A reckless day that got bailed out by a strong tape is a C. If you grade on profit you simply relabel luck as skill, and the record teaches you nothing. Grading execution builds a history of how you behaved, which is the part you can actually improve.
Note the state you traded in
Recording your mental state sounds soft and turns out to be the most predictive field in the whole entry. Calm, focused, hesitant, tilted, chasing, overconfident: pick one. After a month you will see which state your losses cluster in, and that pattern usually shows up faster and more clearly than any pattern in your setups.
Let the context write itself
You should not be typing out what the market did. The regime, the breadth, and the index move for that day can be attached to the entry automatically, and your own trades for that date can be pulled in from your uploaded history. That leaves you writing only the part no system can know, which is what you were thinking and whether you followed your own rules.
The point is the pattern, not the entry
One entry is worth almost nothing. Sixty of them, laid out on a calendar colored by market regime, are worth a great deal: you can see at a glance that your best days cluster in trending tape and your worst ones in chop you should have sat out. That is a specific, actionable finding about you, and it is not available from your broker statement.
How to use this
- Write three lines, not three paragraphs. The journal you keep beats the thorough one you abandon.
- Grade execution, never P&L. A profitable day can be a bad day.
- Record your state of mind. It is the field that pays off fastest.
- Tag the day with the setup and the mistake. Tags are what make the history searchable later.
- Review monthly, not daily. The value is in the pattern across weeks, not in any single entry.
Common questions
What should I write in a trading journal?
What you planned, what you actually did, and whether those matched. Add a grade for your execution and a note on your mental state. Keep it to a few lines so you will still be doing it in a month.
Should I grade my trading days on profit?
No. Grade the quality of the decisions. A disciplined losing day is a good day and a lucky reckless one is not, and grading on profit teaches you the wrong lesson from both.
How often should I journal?
Once per trading day, briefly, and review the collection monthly. The daily entry is data collection; the monthly review is where the insight actually happens.
Does journaling actually improve trading results?
It surfaces repeated mistakes that memory hides, which is usually where the fastest improvement is. It works only if the entries are honest about execution rather than a record of outcomes.
What should I not bother writing down?
Anything a system already knows: the index move, the breadth, the regime, your own fills. Attaching those automatically is what keeps the writing short enough to sustain.
One entry per trading day, with the market context already filled in and your uploaded trades attached, so you write only the part that matters.