Trading Journal: Definition
The trading journal is an essential method and tool that lets you describe, in detail and meaningfully, every trade you take. Here’s a brand-new free trading course from the Captain.
Think of the trading journal as the personal diary of your trading journey. Later on, you’ll be able to look back at it and see the progress made over years of hard work and dedication to your craft. In general, a trading journal consists of technical analysis on a price chart, plus the reasoning behind why a trade is placed.
A trading journal will help you track your progress over time, understand what works and what doesn’t, and stay focused on the future. This journal will help you track your progress over time, understand what works and what doesn’t, and force you to follow a process every single time you do your TA.
To save you time right now, here are the main data points my trading journal already includes:
- Money management
- Risk management
- Trading account used
- Day trading / Swing Trading / Scalping / etc
- Trading system and Strategy
- Spot or Derivatives: Perpetuals / Futures Contracts / Options / etc
- Bias: observed trend
- Timeframes
- Entry and exit points: Take Profit and Stop Loss
- Trading performance
Why Keep a Trading Journal?
A good trading journal is essential for long-term success. The answer really is that simple!
If you don’t have a clear view of every one of your positions, becoming a high-performing trader will be very hard. Keeping a record of your wins, and above all your mistakes, is what will let you move forward. The “why” borders on an absurd question, because it is strictly indispensable!
Keeping a journal is essential to become a pro trader, to speed up your learning, and then to reach profitability on the financial markets. Before you begin, remember that keeping your trading journal rigorously means you save time, not the other way around!
How can a trading journal help me?!
A trading journal is like a time machine: at any moment, it lets you review your trades and their outcomes. It reflects your strategy, your mindset, and the market conditions before, during, and after the trade. Reviewing every relevant detail of your trades will help you understand your success as a trader — what you do well and badly, when and why you take winning or losing trades, and what needs to be improved and how.
Now let’s move on, because after all, what matters is knowing how to build a trading journal and how to keep a trading journal, right?!
How to Build a Trading Journal
You can keep a free trading journal on TradingView or on paper. It all comes down to your personality. At the end of this course, I’ll also share the most widely used method: the Excel spreadsheet, which is another type of free trading journal!
A. Paper Trading Journal / trade sheet / trading log.
Personally, I prefer to write everything down by hand in a notebook or a binder. I prepare a template ahead of time with trade sheets that I file away regularly in a binder. I encourage you to download this sheet and make it a working basis for your own record. In any case, here’s a first free trading journal!
B. Create a Trading Journal in TradingView
Features and benefits of the TradingView journal
Chart annotation tools
The suite of free drawing tools, along with the various text boxes and labels for chart comments, makes it easy to annotate your charts. And yes, you read that right — it’s a free trading journal.
Image snapshots (screenshots)
Users can take a snapshot of the annotated chart using the screenshot feature. They can then add the image link to a journal or to a post entry.
Produce videos
Users can also use the “Produce a video” option to create a video recording of a live trade. It can then be saved and/or shared with the TradingView community.
Share your ideas or keep them private
You can instantly share any post or journal entry with the community by making it “public,” or save it as private for your own records.
A must-have
TradingView provides an all-in-one solution for your analysis, your trading, your journal, and sharing your ideas. It’s an efficient way to keep visual records of your trades while being able to gather feedback or critiques from a thriving community. All of it is within reach on the TradingView platform!
In this article, we’ll explore ways to leverage TradingView’s features to build your own trading journal right inside the platform.
Mapping out the chart
One of the advantages of using TV daily as a trading journal is being able to draw your Monthly or Weekly supports and resistances, or your long-term trendlines, without having to redo them every day. Using Screenshots is a must that no self-respecting trader can do without. The same principles described above can be adapted to TradingView.
Step 1: detailed analysis of the trade and the chart
If you want to include an annotated chart in your journal, TradingView offers awesome annotation tools and features for producing clean, clear chart analyses.
It’s an excellent way to preserve — and possibly to communicate — your thoughts and ideas visually.
TradingView’s tools for analysis and annotation include many drawing tools (50 different ones) and a very rich choice of indicators: more than 100 of them.
Once you’ve annotated the TradingView chart with the appropriate tools, as in the example above, all that’s left is to save your work.
To do so, click the blue “Publish” tag in the top right of your TV chart.
Then click “Publish an idea” and write up your analysis in the form window that opens:
Your analysis should be clear and concise, and only the important points should be noted: Timeframe, Trade style: Intraday or SWING, Risk in %, Entry, TP 1, TP 2, TP 3, Loss, Analysis / Context, Reward/risk ratio.
Where possible, highlight these points using, for example, arrows that will help both you and your potential audience understand your trade at a glance.
Add a title and a description to your trade.
Below you’ll find the template you should follow to describe your trade analysis:
Trade analysis / context: why this trade?
Provide a detailed description of your analysis and your prediction. Walk us through your thought process. It’s important to write this in a way that lets another trader understand your trade idea based on the context you provide.
Action: how will you execute this trade?
Detail how you plan to enter and exit this trade: for example, set it up with SL and TP and forget about it, wait for confirmation before taking a trade, entry, etc. Note any trade management process — for example, whether you plan to move a stop to break-even, set up an automatic Trailing Stop, or trail your stop manually.
Don’t forget to specify the trade direction: Long, Short, or Neutral
Step 2: publish the idea
To publish your idea, TradingView asks you to select a category. You can select several categories (Trend Analysis, Harmonic Patterns, …) or sub-categories: Support and Resistance, Supply and Demand, Pivot Points, …). Then click “Publish a private idea” to save it to your profile.
TradingView also lets you add tags to better sort your trades.
Example tags: Trend following, Swing, US Market, Cryptos, Range, support break, …
Step 3: find your Journal in TradingView
Select the light-bulb icon to find the trade idea in TradingView.
To display or update your journal entries:
1. Click the light-bulb icon in the right-hand panel to display “My Ideas”
Note: your ideas are sorted from the most recent publication date to the oldest. It’s a chronological trading journal.
Tip: You can filter your ideas to show only: Favorite ideas or Private ideas. See the circle below.
2. Click the idea you want to view or edit: This will open the idea.
3. Filter and view the entry
If you click the “tag” located below the chart (see the image below), the posts containing that same tag will be filtered. It’s a simple way to sort your posts so you can find them easily.
Important! Don’t forget to give your tags a name that’s unique to you. Otherwise, other public posts from the community will be filtered into your list.
4. Edit the entry: Click the Edit button in the top right.
This function is used to edit the existing details of your post (it won’t assign a new timestamp, unlike the update entry).
The play button to the right of the chart will load the most recent bars onto your journal-entry chart.
Step 4: updating the entry
The update entry is used to add new details or updates to your existing post. Each update is automatically stamped with a new date and time. It’s an excellent way to keep a journal record of how the trade evolves.
To update an entry: scroll down, then click “Update the idea.” Next, please select the comment type from the drop-down list:
- Close: target reached
- Close: stop hit
- Trading: active
- Trading: cancelled
- Trading: close manually
The “Update the idea” feature is a very useful one that you should consider building into your trading journal. This feature lets users update the trade/market developments recorded along a timeline — clearly showing how the trade has progressed or is progressing.
Step 5: sharing the post on a website or in a journaling solution
One of the ways to leverage the TradingView journal is to link the saved idea to an existing online notebook, a third-party journal, or a journaling solution (Evernote).
TradingView has made this quick and easy by making the URL universal. All you have to do is click Share on the post. See the circle and arrow below.
Select one of the options:
- Link to this chart: to share your idea on Discord, for example.
- Chart as an image : screenshot
- Make a copy: make it my own, to reuse the data for another similar trade.
- Embed: to copy the chart and embed it on your website or your blog
C. Building a Trading Journal with an Excel Spreadsheet
Here’s a downloadable trading journal example, courtesy of the crew!
Using a spreadsheet through an Excel file or a Google Sheet can be very useful thanks to the built-in analytical functions. These can help us better analyze our past decision-making.
In reality, here I use Google Sheets. There’s little chance I’ll teach you anything new here, but it’s a cloud version of Excel. It’s super convenient because you never run into save issues and you can find your file anywhere, anytime! What’s more, both are also a free trading journal !
Here’s an Excel trading journal template adapted into French!
D. Use more ergonomic, purpose-built tools.
TradingView, among others, can take your trading journal to the next level. I use it to present most of my trading plans and technical analyses to you. But we’ve already covered the topic enough.
How to Keep a Trading Journal?
The sole purpose of a trading journal is to give you, at any moment, a clear picture of every trade you take.
Your trading journal should contain relevant details, such as:
- What was the entry price, the stop-loss, and the take-profit?
- How much of your account balance did you put into this trade?
- What were the potential risks and rewards?
- How was the market before and after the trade closed?
- How do you feel before and after the trade?
- How strong is your conviction in the trade?
What, when, and why you traded
Reason for the trade: The reason can come from technical or fundamental analysis, or even a combination of the two. Once you’ve taken several trades, you can reflect on this information to see whether your “reasons” for trading are profitable!
It could also help you determine which strategy works best for you: technical analysis or fundamental analysis? A combination of both?
Conviction is what you feel about the trade. If you take a trade based on a technical pattern and that pattern meets several criteria, your conviction can be described as “high.”
However, if the setup or the analysis doesn’t produce clear conclusions, conviction can be “medium” or “low,” depending on the factors the trade rests on.
By recording your conviction, you can count how many winning trades you took at each conviction level. This can help you decide whether or not you should only trade when you’re highly convinced. It’s no small thing! During our student years, we’ve all had situations where we were convinced we’d bombed an exam only to end up acing it … and the reverse holds true too!
If you have a conviction field in your journal, count the number of winning trades when your conviction was high, medium, or low. Once you have this data, you can decide whether it’s worth trading only when your conviction is high or not.
For example, if you held high conviction on 10 trades and eight of them were winners (the take-profits were hit), that represents an 80% probability of success on your future trades based on your history.
If your conviction was low on 10 trades and only two of them were winners, your future probability of success is only 20%.
You quickly conclude that it’s only worth trading when your conviction is high.
Useful notes
You can write down anything you think is worth recording in your journal. Some traders add a field for how they feel emotionally at the moment they place the trade. Whatever you think could help you, write it down.
Log your trades right after the transaction.
Get into the habit of recording the trade details right after the trade, while it’s still fresh. That way, you won’t have to remember the reasons that pushed you to take the trade. Make sure you only do so after you’ve placed your stop-loss and your take-profit.
Collect the data, analyze it, and take the time to understand why your trades succeeded or failed.
After a while — preferably a few months — once you have enough data, you can sort it, group it, and analyze it in your trading journal.
Trading Journal: The Recap So You Don’t Mess Up
Keeping a trading journal should be one of the first steps traders put in place when they learn to trade. A journal is of the utmost importance for testing different strategies and finding the trading plans that work for each trader.
A trading journal is essential for checking whether a current trading strategy works.
- Trading journals are there to record your trading activity.
- They help traders test different trading plans and strategies.
- Trading journals can also help traders identify the strengths and weaknesses of a trading style.
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Share Your Trading Journal on Discord!
Feel free to come and share your trades with us in our Discord Pro and our Discord Public!!! It’ll help you progress much faster. The supportive veteran members will give you the feedback you need to improve
I sincerely hope you’ve found the methods that suit you for building your trading journal, because without data, you won’t be able to grow as a trader!
If you’re looking for new trading tools and effective methods for positioning yourself on the markets, I recommend the linked sections of my free course!
I wish you all the patience your learning journey requires, and I’ll see you very soon!
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