Your trade journal is a log of all trading activity.
A trading journal provides any serious trader who wishes to make money a tool to help them evaluate themselves objectively.
There are three elements for sustained successful trading:
This journal’s objective is to monitor both the performance of your trading system AND your ability to execute it with consistency.
Poor trading systems are less frequently the cause of poor trading performance than the inability of the trader to properly follow the rules of the trading system.
That’s following the Trading Plan. Your trading journal is intended to make sure you do just that.
Journals are only as good as what is written in them. If one fails to accurately track trades, it becomes hard to judge trading performance.
This should be ongoing efforts, not just a one-off for the sake of completing an assignment.
Be thorough and honest. Do not short-change YOURSELF by failing to put in entries or through incompleteness.
Learning to write and maintain a trading journal will build discipline in you.
Not only that, when you reflect on your entries after a month of trading, we guarantee you will learn a lot about yourself and your trading psychology.
You’ll clearly see what you’re good at, what you suck at, and what the best way it is for YOU to trade.
This is something that no mentor, no book, no video, no seminar can teach you. You have to experience it yourself. Only through this experience will you become a successful trader.
To build the skill of trading, you must have the will to maintain a trading journal.
Here’s some final advice to keeping a helpful trading journal: