Trading Diary

You will encounter an enormous amount of information in trading. The emotions you will experience while doing so will also be unlike anything else. Therefore, you will need a diary. And not just one, but two:

A diary for traders and a diary for emotions.

Trading diary
This's simple. If you don't monitor the effectiveness of your trades and if you don't keep statistics, you're playing the lottery.
Records of your trades help you control not only the trading process, but also your emotions. They show a complete picture of your struggle with the market. A picture that you can then learn from it.
Keeping a trading diary is not difficult at all. It is most convenient to do it in a excel spreadsheet or google docs.
In fact, all you need from a trading diary is:

the open and close time of the trade;
asset name;
trade volume or lot size;
notes (which indicator, which system is used);
and the result

Such a table will give you a lot of opportunities to analyze your trades. And most importantly, it will save you from impulse entries.


Nothing in the table will be forgotten.
What else could be added to it? For example, an extended description of the reasons for entry or reasons for failure. A screenshot taken before you open a trade is very helpful. Some people even record a mini-video, but this is, in my opinion, unnecessary.
All this data is evidence. And you show them to yourself later, if the trade was successful or not. If it was successful, note that it was an excellent entry according to your plan. If not, take apart your mistakes and write them down.


Emotional diary
This diary is treated extremely negligently. You should not keep such diaries because you "have to" do it because someone said something. You have to feel an urgent need to do so, to record your emotions.

How and when to do it? You know the easiest way is sincerity. Be honest with yourself. You can't be successful in trading if you constantly lye to yourself.

Your job is simply to understand how you feel before, during and after trades.
Writing down a lot of words is not an option, it takes time. It makes sense to create a dictionary of code words. Some even use hieroglyphs or emojis for this purpose, as each emojis is a meaningful picture.

By doing this, you begin to understand yourself much better. Every day we experience a fairly fixed set of emotions. Always fear, greed, boredom, joy (much less often than other emotions). In trading in general, emotions are complex, where a thought is followed by an emotion and vice versa.

By exposing your emotional portrait, you will immediately see your weaknesses. Let's say the fear that the trade won't work out. And what is this fear, its reasons?

For example:
Lack of practice (uncertainty);
you are not confident enough in your trading system (doubts);
you have violated money management and are afraid of losing money (fear);
you're working on your last dime and you're scared (fear);
you're sick of all the technicalities (impatience);
the trade is lost (indignation).

What to write in the diary?
Everything that relates to trading: before, during and after. Trading is a set of skills and certain abilities, no matter what specific techniques or tools are chosen. And the final result depends on the systematization of your skills. It depends on how well you follow your own plan, how you execute it and how you monitor it.

The diary should include:
your motivations, why you came into this business;
what the market is to you, how you assess and analyze it;
how you analyze mistakes and missed opportunities;
how you keep track of your trades.

Everything must be prescribed. You can have a simple list; you can have a complex program, whatever you like. Formalize your approach to trading. This is the only way to turn an amateur into a professional trader.

Take screenshots. Lots of them with descriptions. In Tradingview, they are made with one button. You don't even have to install a separate program.


Study your trading diary
The diary is a jewel. It's your trading life. On weekends, when there are no trades, it's a good time to open it and dive into studying your past trading week. As you go through it, try to answer the following questions:

How much, given the risks, was the correct lot size?
Was the entry really as successful as you thought it would be?
What tools could be used to improve it?
Did you think things through patiently or did you open a trade because you couldn't wait?
Did you follow the trading plan when opening the trade?
What happened to the support and resistance levels during the trade?
Was there any big news?

By constantly asking yourself these and similar questions, you will learn to control your emotions and be able to treat the market as a regular, structured work, where no surprises can happen to you, because you have thought everything through in advance and know how to act in case of profits and losses.


What to do with statistic?
Nothing complicated. You actually need the diary for two things:
to find something that works; and what is known to be useless.
It is the diary that allows you to find answers to many questions in relation to currencies, best trading days of the week, special instruments and much more.

If you track your trades in a diary, you're on the road to professional trading. This way you rely on structural logic rather than your memory, which regularly fails us, also due to the continuous influence of emotional factors.

Use it, regularly, do it for yourself. Be sincere with yourself. Talk to yourself, criticize, praise, if there is a reason to do so. Do not keep all your emotions inside, they will come back to you later through wrong trading decisions.


Dear diary...