Improve Your Trade Performance By Keeping A Trading Journal
If you are a financial market trader who either just starting or already a professional, you will reap the benefits of keeping a trading journal, regardless of the instruments that you are trading.
A trading journal is a journal where you keep all your market analysis (technical or fundamental), mock trading, actual trading, and trading outcome (profit or loss). By keeping a trading journal you can learn from your past win and loss so that you can improve the performance of your future trades.
However, a trading journal does not only contain market and trades information, you can also add information and observation such as your mood, your health condition, and even the weather. Basically, anything that makes you understand the market and your trades better is worthy to be put in the trading journal.
In this post, I’m going to explain how you can use Chronopad, an app that lets you collect, organize and display information chronologically, as your trading journal.
Trading Journal Structure
There is no fixed structure for a trading journal, but the journal structure that I currently use contains 4 main information :
- Before the trade i.e. market analysis, technical analysis, market trend
- On the trade i.e. this is when I decide to enter a position (buy or sell an instrument)
- After the trade i.e. enter trade information into the journal
- Other observations i.e. any other information that I think important to my analysis
Of course, the structure will be different from trader to trader e.g. FX trader might have a different journal structure with stock trader or options trader.
Creating Trading Journal with Chronopad
Let’s now create the trading journal using Chronopad.
First, click the Journal menu in the sidebar. it will take you to the Journal screen where you can create a new journal.
Click on the New Journal button on the top right screen and enter the name for your new journal. This will become your trading journal.
Click the Create button and it will direct you to the main journal screen which is still empty for now.
Your trading journal has now been created and you can start entering your trade information and market analysis in it.
Using The Trading Journal
Let’s say you’re a stock trader who specializes in trading technology stocks. Currently, you have been researching and following the market for Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) stock and waiting for the timing to buy this stock.
You can put your stock analysis and observation on the trading journal. For example, you can attach the daily stock price chart in your journal entry.
Few days later, you find a piece of significant news about the company that you can use to support your analysis. So you copy and paste the interesting part of the news to Chronopad and include the URL for reference, so you can visit the news page again later.
At this point, you want to see how the market for PLTR is developing throughout the time. So, using the timeline view, you can view your journal entries chronologically.
The news that you saved to your trading journal confirms your analysis that the market for PLTR is bullish and soon there’ll be a buy signal for this stock.
The buy signal occurs a few days later, so you review your trading journal to determine the entry price limit for your buy order.
Then at the end of the day, you’ve got confirmation that your buy order has been executed.
Now it’s time to enter the trade information into the trading journal.
It’s done for now.
Next, you can do an analysis to find the exit point for your current position, or analyze the market for other promising stocks.
Keeping a trading journal for your trades will also help you in reviewing your trading plan and make adjustments to your plan when necessary.
