Trading journal
Family VII · Market & styles
Not to be confused with trading hours, trading day, trading plan.
Trading journal is a structured record of individual trades and the reasoning behind them, kept so that decisions can be reviewed after the fact. It typically captures entry and exit prices, position size, the stated reason for the trade, and the result. The journal is a personal record rather than a broker document, and its format varies widely between traders.
What a journal records
A journal entry usually covers the trade's essential facts and the trader's intent at the time. Common fields include:
- Instrument and direction (long or short)
- Entry and exit prices, and the date and time of each
- Position size and the risk accepted on the trade
- The stated reason for entering, such as a chart pattern or a news event
- The realised profit or loss, and any fees or commissions
- Notes on how the trade was managed and how it felt to hold
The last item is subjective and cannot be reconstructed from broker statements, which is why many traders keep the journal separately from their account records.
Worked example
A trader buys 200 shares at 24.50 and sells them at 26.10. The journal entry records the gross result and the result net of commission.
The journal stores both figures, so later analysis can separate the effect of the trading decision from the effect of costs.
Use in review
Aggregated over many entries, a journal supports statistics such as win rate, average gain against average loss, and performance by setup or by time of day. These figures are only as reliable as the record itself: incomplete entries, or entries written from memory after the fact, distort the sample. A journal is therefore most useful when completed at or near the time of the trade.
Keeping a journal is a matter of personal practice. Its content, level of detail, and whether it is kept at all are not governed by any market rule.
Often confused with
- trading hours
- Trading hours are the fixed periods during which a venue accepts and matches orders for a listed instrument, set by the exchange or by the individual broker's routing arrangements.
- trading day
- A trading day is a calendar day on which a given market or exchange is open for regular business, excluding weekends and published holidays, and it defines the session during which orders can normally be executed.
- trading plan
- A trading plan is a written document that specifies a trader's markets, entry and exit rules, position sizing, risk limits, and review schedule before any trade is placed.