Site Administrator Swing Trader Data Scientist & DevOps
Manta, Ecuador
Experience: Advanced
Platform: Custom solution
Trading: Futures & Crypto
Posts: 50,241 since Jun 2009
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First, I encourage you to journal your trades here on the forum. By doing so you'll take your trading to a whole new level, you can read more why I think so here:
My main purpose in starting my blog was to hold myself accountable. I knew that by doing so my trading would improve, because I finally made the huge revelation that I (my brain) was holding back my own profitability for one simple reason. I wasn't …
Now if you are unwilling to do that then at least journal your trades in a spreadsheet, one is provided below.
This journal needs to reflect what actually happened. There is no benefit to CYA here (covering your ass). Let it all hang out, you've got to be honest with yourself.
Most any trader can come up with a set of trading rules that, if followed, will be profitable. The problems occur when those rules are not followed, which is the majority of the time for many traders. By journaling, you can go back and see exactly which trades worked, and which failed. Then, out of those that worked, how many followed your rules? etc.
Once you become profitable, the journal can take you to the next level -- determining which of your setups or which trading rule is working best for you, and which is working the worst. Basically you can use the journal to optimize your trades.
I welcome your input on how to improve this journal. I hope to see you posting on the Journal section of the forum, or at least using this spreadsheet! The version of the spreadsheet I have attached allows you to enter "Entry reasons" and "Exit reasons" as a pre-defined list that will be available via a drop-down menu when you are entering trades. Look at the screen shot for an example.
Tip
Edit: Check here for a more detailed journal in excel:
Thanks, Mindset. Do you know what those drop-down menus are called in Excel so I can find them in the Help index? I would like to learn how to make some in my own SS's but never saw them before and didn't know about them. I guess I must have seen them somewhere but never thought it was something an 'ordinary' user could make.
I have Excel 2003 on my Vista laptop and when I clicked on Mike's Excel spreadsheet it automatically did a conversion and then opened. I compared it to the one that Mindset had converted and they look the same, so evidently it lost some formatting when it did the conversion but the main point was that I was able to open it.
