A Trading Journal That Teaches: Structure, Tags and Review

A trading journal is a trader's cheapest and most effective development tool – and the most often neglected. Most journals are just a list of results. A journal that teaches is a database of your decisions from which, after a few weeks, you draw concrete conclusions about your process.

Six fields in every entry

1. Context: what layer the market was in, which levels were nearby, how the broad market was behaving (articles #2 and #4).
2. Plan: what scenario and criteria you had before the decision.
3. Decision: what you did, where and why. Was it in line with the plan?
4. State: your readiness and arousal on a 1–10 scale (the 🧘 Trader's Body and Mind space).
5. Screenshot: before and after the decision. A picture remembers more than words.
6. Lesson: one sentence.

Tags

Add short tags to your entries, e.g. the type of situation, the day type (article #11), “in plan” or “off plan”, “before macro data”. After a month you can filter your entries and see which situations you handle best and worst, and in what state you make the most mistakes.

The weekly review

Once a week, within a fixed time box:

1. How many decisions were in line with the plan?
2. Which tags keep recurring in off-plan decisions?
3. How does your state (sleep, arousal) relate to the quality of your decisions?
4. One change to your process for the following week.

The tool

It doesn't matter whether you keep your journal in a spreadsheet, an app or a notebook. What counts is regularity and honesty. The best journal is the one you actually fill in after every session.

The most common mistakes

• recording only results
• filling in the journal “when there's time” – in other words, rarely
• editing entries after the fact
• no review: data nobody analyses teaches nothing

How we use the journal in the Club

You can post parts of your journal – especially screenshots with a description of the context and the decision – to 🔍 Your chart for review. It's the best material for analysing your process together.

Exercise

Prepare a template with the six fields and fill it in after every session for 2 weeks. At the end, do your first review and post one lesson to 🏆 Wins and lessons.

Educational content, not investment advice. No signals, entries or position sizes.