Tackle Today: Journal your trades
July 22, 2020
Last update: August 2021
≈ You have to keep score. ≈
Traders,
Whether you are paper trading to improve your skills or live trading strategies you need to keep a journal to track your overall performance.
On any given trade, you can win, lose or break even. But one trade is just that. Over time, through the accumulation of data through your trading results, you can start to see a clear picture of how your trading system is performing.
Data-driven analysis is critical in life. You do not want to make decisions based on feelings, hopes or whims. You want to make decisions about what to do based on data and information.
A trader who changes strategies without knowing why, or without a reason through the data will wander aimlessly through the markets. A trader who builds their rules, systems and trades based on historical data will improve and be more successful over time.
If you are not journaling your trades, there will be a learning curve at first to start doing so. But it is not acceptable practice to not journal your trades. It is a mandatory exercise to help you learn.
If you don’t have a trading journal, you can download one here (PRO Members only).
It is recommended that you keep a copy for your paper trades separate from your live trades. It can also be helpful to journal all your similar trades together when studying the performance of a specific strategy. For example, some traders journal all their cash flow trades in one journal and all of their directional trades in another.
Make journaling a priority, and if it is something you stopped doing, get back to it. It is a part of the daily or weekly routine a trader needs to go through to be process-oriented.
Chart of the Day: Trade Journal Example Entries
In the image above, you see a journal filled out with paper trades. As you can see, by journaling your trades over time you can start to gather more detailed information about your trading system’s overall performance. It’s important to journal your trades so that you can make decisions about what to keep, change or discard in terms of your trading strategies through analyzing data over time.
Video of the day: Tackle Trading Trade Journal
Learn how to use the Tackle Trading Trade Journal in this tutorial from Coach Tim.
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Continue learning about this powerful trading tool: the Trade Journals. Tackle Trading has all the resources you need to MASTER them like a PRO. From the Trade Journals themselves to free articles and tutorial videos on how to make the most out of them, we got you covered!
Trade Journaling for Beginners [Free Articles]
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