So many successful traders have praised the power of journaling and collecting as much information as possible about their executions, entries, exits, risk management approach and psychology. Journaling is not just a passive process of data collection, but can actively improve your trading decisions, times when to be in the market or when to stay away, risk-to-reward parameters, maximum drawdown, win rate and so on.
• I have to admit I’ve never been a journaling junkie until the end of 2023, although I have been monitoring my stats across different strategies and asset classes over time, using plain Excel sheets and charts. Yes, I know, I’m old school.
• However, after switching to a professional journaling app recently, I have seen the power of collecting dozens of different metrics and stats about my winning trades, losing trades, drawdown periods, trade duration, trading correlated assets etc.
• To be honest, now I’m regretting that I didn’t start using more professional journaling and tracking tools earlier in my trading career. Most probably, my evolution would’ve been accelerated by quite a bit. But, fortunately, it’s never too late.
• Keep in mind that it is important to journal every single trade that you take, preferably in an automated or semi-automated way so that it doesn’t become a pain in the ass each and every day after you’re done with your trading session.
• Referring back to our roadmap, this step should also be performed at the same time with Steps 2 and 3. Basically, you’re backtesting, demo testing and journaling simultaneously over a continuous period of 90 days. This is exponential growth.
• Make sure you connect your demo account to the journaling service to automatically import and track your trades from day 1. The other option is for you to manually export the trades from your platform and import them in the journal app.
• For me, when doing my research about the various journaling services out there, I’ve taken into account support for MetaTrader5, the amount of features and stats that the service provides, as well as the cleanliness and sex-appeal of the dashboard.
• The journaling website I picked checks all of these boxes and provides many other features on top of them, basically tons of options, stats and insights I never even thought of incorporating into my trade performance analysis. The more, the better.
• Now, keep in mind that any such journaling app allows you to also enter trades manually, and we all know that fake guru who fakes his data to impress naive people online. Be honest with yourself, import every trade as it is and learn from your data.