How to create a trading journal

The one and only thing that will make you a better day trader is by using a trading journal. In your trading journal you’ll log every trade you will ever make. It does not matter If it’s on a demo account, paper trading, backtesting or real money. You should always log all your trades. Without a trading journal you have no idea if your strategy actually works. Besides, how can you remember why you entered a certain trade fifty days ago? A trading journal is the key part of making you a better trader. A trading journal consist of the following parts:

Trading pair
Date
Time of entry
Entry price
Stop loss price
Take profit
Result (Win or loss)
% gain
Tradingview image
Reason for trade
Reason of mistake

The best way to create a journal is using excel or Google Sheets. Tradingview gives you the option to make a tradingview image of the chart. You can use this to analyze previous trades or show them to someone else. Press the camera button in the top right of the chart and pick “copy link to chart”.

Then put the link in your journal under “TV image”. Your journal should look something like this:

You can also list your trading steps in your journal:

Keeping track of your performance over a few months is also important:

If you make the same mistakes over and over you can also put these in your journal:

Using a trading journal will improve your skills over time. Once you start logging more and more trades you can notice patterns. You should go back at least 100 days and start journaling all your trades. Once you are done you have a filled trading journal which you can use to determine if the used strategy was successful or not. You can expand the trading journal with extra information like how much % you gained or lost the last month and how many of your traders were successful. You can also go back in time and check why you made mistakes and what you learned from those mistakes.

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Keeping track of a trading journal is the best way to improve your trading skills. You can go back in time, check your trades, analyze what went wrong and make adjustments to your strategy for future trades.]