A Trading Journal Records What Your Broker Cannot
Key takeaway
- A journal is not a record of prices — your broker has those. It records the reasoning, which disappears within about a day.
- Score yourself on whether you followed the plan, not on the money. One of those is under your control; the other is not.
- Write the positives too. A journal that only lists your mistakes gets abandoned in a fortnight, and an abandoned journal teaches nothing.
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Based on a clip by The Trading Geek (@TheTradingGeek) — YouTube
Your broker already keeps the boring half
Every number a journal could store, a broker statement already stores. The half worth writing down is the half that only exists in your head.
This is why most journals fail before they start. They become a second, worse copy of the account history, and after a month the honest reaction is that it was not worth the time. It wasn't.
The clip is blunt about the format and it is right to be: a notebook is fine, a spreadsheet is fine, an app is fine. The tooling is not the part that decides whether this works.
The five fields
The first one surprises people. The video puts mental state before the trade log, and the ordering is the point: "write down the state that you are in before you start trading." You are recording the input, not explaining the result afterwards.
Field three, market conditions, is the one beginners skip. Without it you cannot tell a broken rule from a rule that is fine but does not work in a choppy week — and those two problems have opposite fixes.
Grade the decision, not the money
"Make $500 this week" is not a goal you can hit on purpose. "Follow the plan on all five trades" is.
This is the strongest idea in the clip, and it is the one most people skip past: "making an amount of money per trade is not an achievable goal." You can execute perfectly in a dead week and finish flat. You can break every rule in a strong trend and finish up.
Scored on the outcome
- A rule-breaking win looks like success
- A disciplined loss looks like failure
- You learn to chase whatever paid last week
Scored on the decision
- A rule-breaking win is still a red mark
- A disciplined loss is a green one
- The score moves before the equity curve does
Judging decisions by their results has a name and a large literature — see outcome bias. The journal is where you stop doing it.
Writing it is half; reading it back is the other half
Log on the day — memory of why decays within hours — and read the week back in one sitting. Patterns are invisible entry by entry and obvious in a batch of fifteen.
And write down what went right. The clip is unusually honest about the reason: a log of nothing but your own mistakes becomes something you avoid opening, and "you will start hating journaling." A journal you abandon has a value of exactly zero.
The one line to leave behind
"A disciplined trader is a profitable trader." Discipline is necessary. It is not sufficient.
Discipline applied to a losing method produces losses on schedule — faster and more consistently than sloppiness would. The journal's job is to tell you which of the two you have: if you followed the plan on thirty trades and still lost, the problem was never your discipline.
That is the question the five fields are built to answer, and it is why the fields include what the market was doing and what your rules said. Once you have thirty honest entries you can compute an expectancy and find out whether the method itself has an edge.
Try this week
- Write your mental state in one line before you open a chart, for five days running.
- Log every trade the same day, including why you entered — not just the fill.
- Score each trade followed-plan or not, and keep that score separate from the P&L.
- Sit down once at the end of the week and read all of it back in one go.
- Leave the review with exactly one rule change, written down.
Common questions
What should I include in a trading journal?
Your state of mind before the session, the trade itself and why you took it, what the market was doing, one thing you did well and one you did badly, and whether you followed your plan. Prices and P&L are already in your broker statement and add nothing.
Do I need a trading journal app?
No. A notebook or a spreadsheet works. The failure mode is never the tool — it is that the entry takes so long you stop making it. Keep it to about two minutes.
How often should I review my trading journal?
Log on the day and review weekly. Individual entries reveal almost nothing; a batch of ten to twenty read in one sitting is where repeated mistakes become visible.
Should I record my emotions when trading?
Yes, and record them before the session rather than after the result. Written in advance it is data about which conditions you should not trade in; written afterwards it is usually a rationalisation.
Why should I write down my winning trades too?
Because a journal that only lists mistakes gets abandoned, and because a win that broke your rules is a warning, not a success. Both halves of the record are needed to tell luck from process.