Trading journal

My trading journal

Log the trades you take on your own broker, review what actually worked, and share a trade with your trainer when you want it looked at.

1
Set your balance
Enter what your trading account is worth. Without it, a result of +70 means nothing — it could be a great month on a small account or a rounding error on a large one.
2
Log the trade the day you take it
Symbol, direction, entry, your stop, and the money you put at risk. The trade you write down a week later is the one you remember wrong.
3
Close it with the real number
When you're out, add the close date and the result your broker actually paid you, fees included. Open trades are listed but never scored.
4
Read the curve, not the last trade
The equity line, win rate, R and drawdown answer the only question that matters: is this way of trading making money across many trades?
5
Share one trade for review
Tick the box on a single trade and your trainer can see it and comment. The rest of your journal stays private.

What the numbers mean

R — result in risk units: Your profit divided by the money you had at risk. Risk 50 and make 100 and that is +2R. It's how a gold trade and a stock trade end up on one scale.
Win rate: The share of closed trades that made money. On its own it proves nothing — 30% wins with big winners beats 70% wins with one huge loser.
Expectancy (per trade): Net result divided by the number of trades: what you earn, on average, each time you press buy. Negative means trading more loses more.
Payoff: Your average win divided by your average loss. A payoff of 2 means you can be wrong more often than right and still finish ahead.
Max drawdown: The deepest fall from a high point of your account to the low that followed. It's the pain you had to sit through — and the number that ends accounts.
Risk per trade: The money you risked as a share of your balance. Professionals live between 0.5% and 2%. Above that, a normal losing streak takes the account.
Risk score: A 0–100 grade for your process: position size, stops, what happens to your size after a loss, drawdown. It ignores profit on purpose — the question is whether this way of trading survives a bad month, not whether last month was good.

Three rules that make it work

Write it the same day. Memory edits trades. The version you record on Friday is not the trade you took on Monday.
Always record what you risked. Without it there is no R, no risk percentage, and no way to tell a good trade from a lucky one.
Score the process, not the result. The 1–5 "followed the plan" rating is the one field a losing trade can still score full marks on — and it's the one that predicts next month.

Your journal is private by default. Nobody — not other members, not trainers — sees a trade until you tick the share box on it. The one thing you can hand over as a whole is your risk summary: percentages and a grade with no money in them, off unless you switch it on, and gone again the moment you switch it back.