Do you journal your trading progress?

[GreatArkansas]

(....)
So, I want to ask the traders in the house, how serious do you take the journaling process of your trades and has it help you do better? Then I also want to ask, do you believe that journaling your trading progress can actually help a trader to improve?.

In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with doing your journal for your trading progress, and there's also nothing wrong with not doing it.
Since for me, I'm a busy person and I only have a few vacant hours, I started before doing journal, but sometimes I forget. So what's most effective to me is on some other exchanges, they have this feature like you can view your past trades, some analytics, weekly view/monthly view which will help you too where and how to improve your trades.

[shinratensei_]

I journaled just my PnL by simply exporting my transaction history, feed it to AI and tell it to create an interactive chart.

The hard thing to do is to journal my defi activity, UI/UX so scattered it becomes pain to journal a long list of transaction history, so far it helped me a lot to know where I'm at and how is my overall trading winrate which I assume going to be helpful for newbie to review their performances.

[jcojci]

I only check on my trading history weekly or monthly to see how the progress and how much I lost and profit. I don't do that too complicated because if I doing that, I can't releasing the lost feeling in trading. That could attract me recovering my lost which will be difficult so I don't take it seriously and just searching for other opportunities.

But some traders journaling their trading and check more details their lost trading to find where the mistake is. They might learns more about the lost so they can be better in the next trades but we have our own way in trading so we have a different things to do which will not be the same as others.

[Oshosondy]

So, I want to ask the traders in the house, how serious do you take the journaling process of your trades and has it help you do better? Then I also want to ask, do you believe that journaling your trading progress can actually help a trader to improve?.

I am not having trading journal at all, this is because I know the rules and the path I should follow to have profit in trading. If I am later controlled by emotions and not follow the part and lost money while trading, I would have done the same if I have trading journal. I do not see it useful for me at all.

[Dr.Bitcoin_Strange]

Most CEXs offer great analytic tools to track your performance and possible mistakes.

I'm not sure a separate journal is really necessary at this point.

Unless maybe you need to find connections between your trading performance and your real life events/mood/psychological state.

Not trying to undermine how useful AI has become lately for such purpose, especially for CEX that has enable such a feature, but in this cases it's not just about the analysis and performance, it's generally everything you did in respect for that trade, more about the last thing you said. Some successful trader would say, "trading is 80% psychology, after learning the technical and fundamental analysis(20%), everything else depends on you."
Some CEX that has the feature you are talking about might not actually have all the characteristics that every traders wants, that's why some people still do their journaling by themselves.

I'm familiar with this trading strategy

It's just a form of record keeping that helps you maintain consistency in your style of trading, it's not totally a strategy.

[Zlantann]

Most CEXs offer great analytic tools to track your performance and possible mistakes.

I'm not sure a separate journal is really necessary at this point.

Unless maybe you need to find connections between your trading performance and your real life events/mood/psychological state.

Not trying to undermine how useful AI has become lately for such purpose, especially for CEX that has enable such a feature, but in this cases it's not just about the analysis and performance, it's generally everything you did in respect for that trade, more about the last thing you said. Some successful trader would say, "trading is 80% psychology, after learning the technical and fundamental analysis(20%), everything else depends on you."
Some CEX that has the feature you are talking about might not actually have all the characteristics that every traders wants, that's why some people still do their journaling by themselves.

I'm familiar with this trading strategy

It's just a form of record keeping that helps you maintain consistency in your style of trading, it's not totally a strategy.

Everybody will apply the pattern that works well for them. I have heard some people say they keep records of their gambling activities. And they review this record periodically to ascertain how well or badly they are faring in gambling. They might find it helpful because the record could be detailed. But I don't find it helpful because most casinos have features that can help you track your gambling transactions.

sergiorus finds the analytic tools in centralized exchanges helpful and might not require manually recorded journals.

[Benhouse]

I learnt something just last night as I was watching a video interview of a few traders, these traders talked about the importance of journaling their trading progress, how it has helped them to learn from their mistakes and become better. What they usually do is that, they write down every trades they took during the week, every information about taking that trade, they will write it down, then on weekends they review the journey to check if they actually followed their rules and strategy. It doesn't matter if they lost the trade or not but they will write every single steps they took before taking the trade until when they closed the trade.

For me, I don't completely do that but I only take screenshots and later on I can revisit the screenshot, it helps me to also check if it was still the same strategy I'm maintaining in all the trades I'm taking.

So, I want to ask the traders in the house, how serious do you take the journaling process of your trades and has it help you do better? Then I also want to ask, do you believe that journaling your trading progress can actually help a trader to improve?.

For me journaling changed everything, but only when I stopped doing it by hand. Screenshots are a good start, the problem is you cannot measure anything with them. You will never see that you lose money after 2 losses in a row, or that your best setup is the one you take the least.

Excel template works and it is free, I can share mine if you want. The limit is you have to type everything manually, so most people stop after 3 weeks.

What changed it for me is connecting the exchange with API, so the trades come in automatically and I only add the context: tag, mistake, emotion in the trade. After a few months you start to see your own patterns, and that is where the progress is. The psychology part is the one nobody measures, and it is the one that costs the most.

Full disclosure, I am building a tool that does exactly this, so I am not neutral. But even a spreadsheet beats screenshots.

[Peanutswar]

For those who wanted to take their trading journey seriously its necessary because this could be your guide if ever to analyze your set up and also you need to change something into the strategy sometimes unexpected things happen to our trades, other getting loss with their path and make a wrong decisions with their position or even worst make a revenge trades without a proper plan or plot with the trade, just pure emotions so its a must to understand what will be the market next move.

Personally I do have a plan but im a swing trader so this tooks so many days or weeks before there is a changes happens in the market and also to analyze than into lower time frame of course its all depends on our availability what kind of trader are we.

[lovesmayfamilis]

I am not a trader, but I have tried several times to learn from my friend, who also advised me to start and further understand by writing down my actions in the simplest form. He also makes rules for controlling his trades, including not only the strategy that he tries to adhere to but also assessing emotions at these moments, describing risk levels, and regularly analyzing them later in order to achieve increased profitability.

[Benhouse]

I am not a trader, but I have tried several times to learn from my friend, who also advised me to start and further understand by writing down my actions in the simplest form. He also makes rules for controlling his trades, including not only the strategy that he tries to adhere to but also assessing emotions at these moments, describing risk levels, and regularly analyzing them later in order to achieve increased profitability.

Your friend gave you the whole method in one paragraph. Most people only do the first third.

Logging what you did is the easy part. The two that change anything are the ones he slipped in at the end: your state at the moment you clicked, and re-reading it all later.

Four fields is plenty: why you took it, risk in percent (not currency), one word for how you felt before entry, what you'd do differently after.

Then read a month at once and look for repeats, not mistakes. Mine was that my losses clustered in one specific hour of the session. Invisible in any single trade.

Keep it under two minutes per trade or you'll quit within a month. Paper works.

[Synchronice]

I learnt something just last night as I was watching a video interview of a few traders, these traders talked about the importance of journaling their trading progress, how it has helped them to learn from their mistakes and become better. What they usually do is that, they write down every trades they took during the week, every information about taking that trade, they will write it down, then on weekends they review the journey to check if they actually followed their rules and strategy. It doesn't matter if they lost the trade or not but they will write every single steps they took before taking the trade until when they closed the trade.

For me, I don't completely do that but I only take screenshots and later on I can revisit the screenshot, it helps me to also check if it was still the same strategy I'm maintaining in all the trades I'm taking.

So, I want to ask the traders in the house, how serious do you take the journaling process of your trades and has it help you do better? Then I also want to ask, do you believe that journaling your trading progress can actually help a trader to improve?.

I also do screenshots but that's not the right way to do it because you often forget when you took this screenshot, what were you thinking in that moment and so on. So, I think that these screenshots that I keep are useless for me to develop as a trader and make better decisions.

Honestly, I have never thought about journaling my trading progress but right now, I really think about this. I think to create an excel sheet where I'll write down my analysis, the price I chose to buy and sell, the date of buying and selling and other important details. I'll do it regularly and then with the help of the AI, I'll make a deep analyzes of my trading choices and habits and will try to improve it.

[Pandu Geddon]

Then I also want to ask, do you believe that journaling your trading progress can actually help a trader to improve?.

I believe when traders pay attention to their previous trades and learn something from their experiences, they will definitely gain some improvement. Simply, when we lose, we need to find the reason or cause of our loss. We can't start trading in the same way. There have to be adjustments and analysis in every transaction we make.

[Byebyebtc]

Journaling of trades is indeed very important, and it is one thing that is ignored in trading journey by a lot of traders.
And the funny thing is even if one desires to do it they always get lazy at the end and get inconsistent, I personally will not count myself out I am definitely guilty of this.
I just do the same thing like you said screenshotting of trades I took and using them to learn later on, yes this is also a good thing and it has its own benefits as well, but it's not as good as both journaling your trades and screenshotting them as well

If only we can get discipline when it comes to handle little things like this, then we are creating steps towards profitability, because you learn from what you journal wether it be in loss or in profits, and in that manner you will only get better.

[Big Dirams]

Then I also want to ask, do you believe that journaling your trading progress can actually help a trader to improve?.

I believe when traders pay attention to their previous trades and learn something from their experiences, they will definitely gain some improvement. Simply, when we lose, we need to find the reason or cause of our loss. We can't start trading in the same way. There have to be adjustments and analysis in every transaction we make.

A lot of traders underestimate the power in checking out our previous entries and finding the reasons why such entry ended in profits or in losses. Many of this professional traders always have the spirit of learning from their mistakes because they understand a trader can’t understand everything in trading no matter how knowledgeable such trader is that just the facts about trading so while we face losses we should check out where the fault comes from either us or it fundamental news so when next we face same situations we can easily know what we are meant to do next.
 Losses are part of this journey and we can’t runaway from it but we should reduce our losses and take it to minimal level.