How to keep a trading journal
A trading journal is a record of the decisions behind your trades, not just their results. This guide covers what to record, what the common metrics actually mean, and how to review entries so the journal changes what you do.
Why the P&L column is not enough
Most people who start a journal record what they traded and what it made or lost. After a few months they have a spreadsheet that tells them their account is up or down, which they already knew.
What is missing is the decision. A green trade taken for the wrong reason and a red trade taken for the right one look identical in a P&L column, but they point in opposite directions. Recording only the outcome teaches you to repeat whatever happened to work, which in markets is a good way to learn the wrong lesson confidently.
What to record for every trade
| Field | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Asset and date | Lets you group by market and see time-of-week patterns. |
| Setup | Names the pattern you thought you saw. Vague entries here are a warning sign. |
| Result in money | The plain outcome, after costs. |
| Result in R or percent | Makes trades of different sizes comparable. |
| Holding period | Separates scalps from positions that need different judgement. |
| Did you follow the plan? | The single most valuable field, and the one most often skipped. |
| A short note | What you expected, and what surprised you. |
Write the note while the trade is fresh. A week later you will remember a tidier version of your own reasoning than the one you actually had.
The metrics, briefly
Three numbers come out of a journal, and each is misleading alone:
- R multiple — your result in units of the risk you took. Risk $100, make $200, that is +2R. It makes trades of different sizes comparable.
- Win rate — the share of trades that made money. On its own almost meaningless, because it says nothing about how big the wins and losses were.
- Profit factor — gross winnings divided by gross losses, across the trades you logged.
None of them means much across a handful of trades, and the figure that actually ties them together is expectancy. R multiple, win rate and profit factor explained works through each properly, with the sample sizes at which they start to count.
Keep R and percent apart
An R multiple and a percentage return answer different questions, and averaging them together produces a number that means nothing. RATTLE records them in separate fields and never converts either into money for you, which is fussy on the day and useful six months later.
Reviewing what you recorded
A journal only pays for itself when you read it back. Review on a schedule rather than after a painful day, read the trades where you did not follow the plan first regardless of how they ended, and count repeated behaviour rather than trusting your impression of it.
How to review a trade sets out the questions to ask about the entry, the size, the management and the exit, and how to run a monthly review without over-correcting.
Common ways a journal goes wrong
- Filling it in afterwards. Reconstructed reasoning is always more coherent than the real thing.
- Recording only interesting trades. The boring ones are the baseline.
- Notes too vague to use. "Bad entry" tells future you nothing. "Entered before the retest because I was worried it would leave without me" tells you plenty.
- Grading yourself on outcome. If a loss automatically means a mistake, you will start avoiding correct trades that happened to lose.
- Abandoning it during a bad run. That is exactly the stretch the record is for.
Keeping a journal in RATTLE
Each closed practice trade is logged with its asset, result, holding period, a checklist of what happened — followed the plan, sized correctly, waited for confirmation, moved the stop, FOMO entry, exited early — and a free-text note. The checklist produces a process score from the boxes you tick, not from whether the trade made money, and not from AI.
The calendar shows a month at a time, so habits that are invisible trade by trade become obvious across thirty. You can export the whole journal to a file at any point.
Start a trading journal