How to Keep a Trading Journal: What to Record, How to Review

A trading journal is a record of every trade you take: the plan, how you executed it and how it ended. Without one, you remember the big wins and the painful losses, and the ordinary trades fade. With one, you can see which rules make money and which quietly cost it. Here is what to record, what a finished entry looks like and how to review the journal every week.

Why keep a trading journal

• It shows patterns you miss in the moment. One trade tells you little. Fifty trades with the same fields show which setup, time of day or market works for you.
• It stops you repeating the same mistake. A loss you wrote down with its cause is harder to repeat than one you only remember.
• It separates good process from good luck. A winning trade that broke your rules is still a bad trade. The journal is where you notice.

What to record in a trading journal

An entry has four parts. Fill in the first before you enter and the rest right after you exit.

• Plan. Date and time in UTC, exchange or broker, instrument, direction. The setup: the rule that tells you to enter. Entry price, stop loss and take profit. Position size and the risk in dollars and as a percentage of the account.
• Execution. Exit price and time. How you exited: stop, target or by hand, and why. Net result in dollars after fees and funding.
• Result in R. R is the trade's risk: what you lose if the stop is hit. The result in R is profit divided by that risk, so +2R means you made twice what you risked. Add MAE and MFE here too: how far price went against you and in your favor while the trade was open. The MAE and MFE guide shows how to read them.
• Behavior. Did you follow your rules: yes or no. How you felt in the trade: calm, tired, angry after a loss. A chart screenshot at entry and at exit. One lesson from the trade.

The result in R lets you compare trades of different sizes. A 300 USDT profit with 100 USDT at risk and the same profit with 600 USDT at risk are different trades: +3R and +0.5R.

Trading journal example: one filled-in entry

Here is one trade as it looks in the journal. The account is 10,000 USDT and the risk per trade is 1%.

A winning trade still got the mark “rules broken”. That is normal. The journal grades how well you follow your system, not only the money.

The size here comes from the risk: 100 USDT divided by the 1,250 distance to the stop gives 0.08 BTC. The risk per trade guide walks through that calculation.

How to review your trading journal

Three rhythms work well together:

• After each trade, two minutes. Fill in the result, the rules mark and one lesson while you still remember.
• Once a week, half an hour. Find execution mistakes: the steps below.
• Once a month. Judge setups: a week holds too few trades for that.

The weekly review, step by step:

1. Collect every trade of the week. Winners, losers and the tiny ones too.
2. Count four numbers. Number of trades, win rate, average win and average loss in R.
3. Work out the expectancy. It is the average result of one trade in R. Positive means the system makes money; negative means it loses.
4. Split the trades by setup. Each setup has its own expectancy. A weak setup hides behind a strong one in the total.
5. Look separately at trades where you broke your rules. How many R they made or cost.
6. Pick one change for next week. Write it in the journal so you can check it a week later.

Expectancy = Win rate × Average win − Loss rate × Average loss

An example. The week had 20 trades: 9 winners averaging +1.6R and 11 losers averaging −0.9R. Expectancy: 0.45 × 1.6 − 0.55 × 0.9 = 0.72 − 0.495 = +0.225R per trade. Over the week that is +4.5R; with 100 USDT at risk per trade, +450 USDT.

Twenty trades are too few to judge a system: the plus or minus can be chance. The weekly review catches execution mistakes. Conclusions about setups are safer over a month or more.

Spreadsheet, notebook or app?

The format matters less than filling it in every time.

• Spreadsheet. Excel or Google Sheets: flexible and free, but every trade is typed by hand. A free trading journal template has the core of these fields ready to fill: it computes risk, R and net PnL after fees and funding, and has columns for setup, mistake and emotion.
• Notebook or Notion. Good for notes and screenshots, weak for numbers: win rate and expectancy have to be counted separately.
• Journal app. Some apps load trades from the exchange through a read-only API key, so prices, fees and times arrive without typing. The plan, the rules mark and the lesson are still yours to write.

Common trading journal mistakes

• Recording only the result. Without the plan you cannot tell what failed: the idea or the execution.
• Filling it in after the fact. A day later you no longer remember why you entered or what you saw on the chart.
• Skipping the awkward trades. Impulse entries and emotional trades usually cost the most. Leave them out and your statistics lie.
• Counting only in dollars. Trades of different sizes cannot be compared that way. In R they can.
• Forgetting fees and funding. With a 0.05% fee on each side and a stop 2% from entry, fees take about 0.05R per trade. Twenty trades a week is already 1R.
• Too many fields. A journal that takes too long to fill in gets abandoned. Start with the plan, the result in R and the rules mark.
• Writing it and never reading it. A journal only pays off in the review.

Trading journal FAQ

How often should I update my trading journal?

The plan goes in before each entry and the result right after each exit. Reading it back is a weekly job.

How many trades before a journal is useful?

A week of entries already shows execution mistakes such as moved stops or skipped plans. Judging a setup takes more: a month of trades or more, split by setup.

Should I journal demo trades?

Yes, if you treat them as practice for real trading. Keep them in a separate account or tag so they do not mix with real results.

Key takeaways

• Plan before entry, result right after exit. Then the journal shows what happened, not what you would like to remember.
• Review by the numbers. Expectancy in R for each setup tells you what to keep and what to drop.

Sources

• Van Tharp Institute: A Short Lesson on R and R-Multiples: R as the initial risk set by the stop, results in R multiples, expectancy as the average R multiple.
• Binance Academy: What Is an API Key and How to Use It Securely: a portfolio tracker needs only a read-only key.