What to record in a trading journal — and why each field matters

A trading journal is only as useful as the questions it can answer later. Every field you record is a question you will be able to ask of your history. Leave a field out and that question is closed for good — you cannot reconstruct how you felt about a trade six months after the fact.

The execution: what happened

Start with the facts a broker already knows: instrument, direction, entry and exit prices, quantity, and the time you entered and exited. Record fees and funding separately from gross P&L. A strategy that looks profitable before costs and flat after them is a very different strategy.

The plan: what you intended

• Stop and target. Without a stop you cannot measure a trade in units of risk.
• Planned risk — the amount you were prepared to lose. It is the denominator of every R-multiple.
• Confidence, on a simple scale. Over time you can check whether high-confidence trades actually do better.
• A note written before entry. One or two sentences on why you are taking the trade.

The context: why you took it

Tag each trade with the setup and the strategy it belonged to. Keep the list short and consistent: “ORB retest” and “opening range retest” recorded as two different tags will split your statistics in two. The point of a setup tag is to let you compare setups later, so it only works if you apply it the same way every time.

The state of mind: how you felt

Emotion and mistake tags are the fields traders most often skip, and the ones that explain the most. “Rushed”, “revenge” or “oversized” recorded on the day is evidence. The same judgement made from memory at the end of the month is a story.

The review: what you learned

After the trade closes, write what happened relative to the plan, and one lesson if there is one. Attach a chart screenshot of the entry and exit. A screenshot is the fastest way to remember a trade when you review it weeks later.

Keep it fast

A journal you stop using records nothing. Define your tags once, record the plan in a sentence, and let imports handle the execution data. In TradeDrift, the execution fields come from manual entry, a CSV import or a read-only broker sync, so the part you type is the part only you know.