Do you journal your trading progress?

[henmark]

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?.

Not only trading, but anything that a person does which they are doing to make money and are very serious about it, they should always make notes about the process and what they are doing, and then keep updating those notes with the results. This is a great way to see the progress after you look at the history of how you have been doing things, it also helps you find what you did that you shouldn't have done so that you can keep that in mind. This absolutely allows a trader to actually improve over time if they know the right pattern to note everything down. You should journal things in a way that you should be able to understand everything properly when you look at it at a later time.

I'm not doing trading these days for personal reasons, but when I used to do trading, I used to do the same thing. I would use Google Docs to write down everything that I would do with my capital. If I'm doing a future trade, I would write down the amount I'm using, the coin I'm trading, my leverage size, my take profit and stop-loss limits, and then the overall balance before making the trade, and the balance after the trade is closed, and also write how the trade was closed, whether the stop-loss got hit, Take-profit got triggered, or I closed it myself. And, it used to be extremely helpful.

[GbitG]

......

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?.

Yep absolutely.. I am journaling my trading......!!!

When I started my trading journey, I was thinking that this is just a bullshit like have a good memory and i will keep all of my steps in head but at end I was always in lose like I breached a lot of account due to lack of discipline. So after that my mentor suggest me to keep down all of his analysis in notebook and through this you will be able to get shaped in discipline as well as you will also understand that how much you follow the risk management instructions.

So when I started journaling, then immediately I observe that I have a lot of mistakes and simply because of this I avoided all those wrong decision which I mostly did before journal.

So always made a journal because I have seem a lot of successful tarder who wrote down his journal and I believe that this was their success secret like they observe visually all of his mistakes which led him into losing streak.

[JunaidAzizi]

Yes, that's actually true, and you have drawn our attention to a very good matter, which I think most traders won't do. However, now they will understand how necessary and important it is. When you are trading and writing everything in your book, after a week or a few days, you can compare it with your whole week's data. Then you would understand where you actually made a mistake. You will clearly know whether your progress is increasing or not. Most importantly, when your trade results in a loss, analyzing that day can clearly point out where you made a mistake. So, in my opinion, I think it's the best way to overcome mistakes and improve your trades, and I recommend it to everyone.

[Stable090]

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.

I dont think journaling your trade is really necessary, I see that as a waste of time because everything you are trying to document is already in your trading history. If I need to do some research about my trade, I just need to enter the exchange which am using to trade, and check my trading history, then get any information which I need. Writing down your trading journey is really a waste of time to me, but I don’t know if some people don’t see it as a stress, and they find the strategy useful to them.

[Agathamay]

I'm a very inconsistent trader and what I mean is that, I can trade for a month and decide not to trade for 3 other months and that doesn't mean that, I haven't been following the market trends or updates but I could remember back then when I was starting my trading journey, I always try to keep track of my trades and one of the major reasons I did it was because I always try to monitor my progress of my trades if I was making losses or profits and  it also helped me know when to take a break from the market and it did helped me from chasing my losses.

[Adiljutt156]

OP, thank you very much for creating a thread on such an important topic. The idea of a journal is unique, and if traders follow that path, there will be more chances of their success. If you write your mistakes and you will write the all path you followed and you got profit or loss, you will be able to finalize the result where you need to improve yourself. After you can talk with your mentor and he will give you solution. As many people make mistakes but they are not writing their mistakes and they are doing same mistakes again and again. Your progress will be if you will follow that path and you have to sincere with you but for that you have to make some extra effort and everyone wants to stay away as that is different process.

[L E G E N D A R Y]

I dont think journaling your trade is really necessary, I see that as a waste of time because everything you are trying to document is already in your trading history. If I need to do some research about my trade, I just need to enter the exchange which am using to trade, and check my trading history, then get any information which I need. Writing down your trading journey is really a waste of time to me, but I don’t know if some people don’t see it as a stress, and they find the strategy useful to them.

Journaling your trading progress is quite different from just writing down your previous trades, like how many trades have been a success and a failure, that’s not it because just like you said, all those details are just sitting down in your portfolio. But when we talk about journaling, we are talking about more than just the trades, we are talking about further more, like what inspired you to take such trades, how and where you drew your analysis, if it was successful or ended in failure, and several other things. These journals can help give you an overview and insight into your current strategy and approach, whether or not you need to make some changes, and if so, how and where you need to make those changes.

[EarnOnVictor]

-Snip-
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?

I did many years ago, but not anymore. I stopped because that wasn't the problem I had with trading, but the problem was in my trading psychology. No matter how I documented everything, I still reneged on the plan, so what's the point? But if it works for you, fine. Even today, there is no need for you to go through the stress of detailing your trades and the results; you can fetch them directly from your chart and ask a specially built EA or even built-in AI on the platform to do the math for you.

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

Absolutely! This is what we termed "trading evaluation." No one can undermine it.

[Slow death]

I don't keep any records of my trades. I prefer to trade on a 4-hour chart, with good volume. I've already memorized the support and resistance levels, and then I wait to see trend reversal candles, along with some moving averages, and then I buy. For example, currently the price of Bitcoin is at $63,800.



Place this arrow to signal to me that if the price drops below this line, it will fall to $62,000 or even $61,300. So, if it falls to these low levels and then there are trend reversal candles with high volume, then I would buy, and my selling target would be at $65,000, meaning a profit of 5% or 6%, which would be acceptable to me. Since I've memorized this whole process over the years, I don't need to write anything down; the Bitcoin movement remains the same. The support and resistance levels are the same. Of course, this is my view.

[Dareo]

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?.

Personally I don't keep a full journal, I keep screenshots of my well analyzed trades and sometimes I make small notes next to important trades explaining why I entered or where I went wrong. Although I don't do it consistently. but looking at them later, I can see if I'm still following the same strategy or if I'm breaking the rules because of emotion. For me that alone often helps me avoid making big mistakes over and over again.

[Doan9269]

Personally I don't know my crypto trading progress, maybe it was because I don't have any reason to do that as there is no demand for me in any way to engage on such move, should in case I needed anything further about my trading, I should be able to see such under the history and be able to track on it, even though it may not be as precisive as I may wanted it because it will be in combination of both the ones I won and the one I lose, but I like the fact that what should be considered here is the progress we made and not the ones that we got defeated upon, such could be a good reminder to us about how sweet trading good be an as well productive in giving us a desired expectation if we get it right.

[Mame89]

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, keeping a journal will greatly assist you in trading. A trading journal will help if done consistently. I myself sometimes do it, even if it's just reviewing my trading results regularly, but it's better to keep notes. With a journal we can identify error patterns when entering trades, limit trades to avoid overtrading, and most importantly, we can control our emotions.

Many people who don't keep a trading journal are successful, but without a journal it's difficult to learn from our mistakes. Even if we're busy and manual journaling is complicated, there are now many history features and analysis on exchanges that make it easier. Essentially, we should continue to review our trading results regularly because not only can we learn from mistakes but it can also improve our trading skills.