So you heard all the things about how a trading journal can change your trading, help you with discipline and analysis, improve your reflection on past trades, and so on. And now you are convinced you need one but don’t know where to start. First of all, let me congratulate you on making one of the best trading decisions in your life (deciding to start a trading journal). Second, I would love to share with you some best practices for your trading journal.

Simply put, your trading journal should contain the following:

• Pre-market preparation section
• Live market hours section, usually known as the “trade log” section
• Aftermarket reflection section
• Preparation for the following trading day section
• Weekend reflection

Now let’s go into more depth on what each of these sections should look like and contain. We will leave out Weekend Reflection since that is an article just on its own. If you want to be notified when that article comes out you can leave your email below, and we will send you a message.

Pre-market preparation section

We have already done a very in-depth look at what a good pre-market routine looks like. You can find that article here.

The goal of a pre-market routine is to prepare for the trading day ahead. That means, first of all, you have to get in the right mindset. If you are carrying any negative emotions that would impact your trading this is when you should detach from them, wipe the slate clean. So it is good to involve a question or a practice that helps you reset your mental state.

Next, we want to review any important events that are happening today. Any events that may impact the markets, especially the markets which you plan to trade. Knowing about any economic releases or FED meetings ahead of time will reduce the number of surprises during your trading day, which is what we want since the markets can be surprising just on their own.

Another very important thing to do before the market opens is to create a list of symbols that you expect to trade today. If you are not trading using an automated trading system, keeping track of many symbols can usually get out of hand. So it is best to identify 3-7 symbols that you think have the potential to be good trading candidates today. Note that list down and stick to it during the day.

Lastly, we want to make sure we remember our trading rules, we stick to our plan and we are prepared for anything the markets might throw at us today. For this reason, it is good to set up a short questionnaire that you answer every morning just to solidify these things. What we do in The Ultimate Trading Journal is ask you about any worst-case scenarios you imagine happening today and how would you deal with them. This way we establish a contingency plan and act from a state of logical and rational thinking and not from an emotional state when things turn south. Another question to ask yourself is something that would remind you of your trading plan, we like to ask what are your hard rules for the day. As in rules that you must never break.

Bonus tip: use some kind of NLP technique to program yourself for success today. Formulate questions in a way that makes you think of success and not of failure. Add questions or quotes that help you reach a state of flow.

To summarise, your pre-market section in your trading journal should have:

• A question/quote/note field/practice that helps you reset and drop any negative emotions
• A place to note key economic events for the day
• A list to note your trading universe for the day. The symbols you believe have the most potential for good trade setups
• Questionnaire to set a plan in case of unexpected events in the market
• Questionnaire to remind yourself about your trading rules
• Questionnaire that helps you set a positive outlook on trading
• Best to phrase questions in a way where they emphasize success. However, don’t do that if it costs your questions to lose their value in preparing you for real-world trading. Always have a plan for everything and always follow that plan. We don’t want to only dream, we want to be prepared.

During market hours section

The goal of this section is to primarily help you keep track of your trades. This is where usually traders put the most emphasis on in their trading journals, just logging and tracking the trades, their charts, etc. However, we believe that is one of the least important parts of a trading journal. Having a log of trades can only help you improve your system, however usually traders fail not because of a bad system, but because of their psychological and personal compatibility issues with their system. If you don’t have a good system that you have statistically analyzed back and forth then you should do that first instead of working on a trading journal. If you do have a good system, then analyzing your trade setups will only help you ever so slightly. What you must work on is strengthening your discipline, your belief in your system, your trading psychology, and making fewer trading mistakes (the only trading mistake is not following your system, even slightly).

All that being said, that is why we simply recommend you come up with a way of tracking your trades that suits you. If you are making a digital trading journal, then feel free to take chart screenshots. Just be sure to add reflection areas next to each trade. In those areas, you want to note down your psychological issues with that trade. Did you hesitate to enter after a clear signal? Do you feel like moving your stop? Also, add a place to constantly reevaluate the trade. Once we are in a trade it is hard for us to see its flaws, so consistently checking if our trade is still as good as it first seemed is a good practice. Of course don’t forget to add the basics, entry price, stop levels, position size, etc. It is good to know why you entered the trade too. What we like to do in The Ultimate Trading Journal is to have pre-market and after-market trade review sections. That way you assess your trade twice if it carries overnight. A lot can change during a trading day, and a trade that looked perfect in the morning may turn into a complete sucker by the end of the day.

A pro tip: have a pre-trade checklist in this section. This checklist should contain questions that you want to ask yourself before entering any trade. Such as, am I forcing this trade? Does this trade follow my trading plan? Do I have enough risk capital to take this trade? Feel free to come up with your own, or check this The Ultimate Trading Journal pdf for inspiration.

After-market reflection

The purpose of this section is twofold. First – we want to review and assess how we did today. Second – we want to get a head start on the next trading day.

In order to assess yourself, we recommend you simply create 4-6 short questions that you would evaluate from 1 to 5. These questions should review how disciplined you were today, how well did you follow your trading plan, how well did you manage your emotions, and similar. By doing this we want to find patterns in our trading that expose places to improve upon. So if you notice day after day you evaluate your trading plan following 1 or 2, you know that is what you want to work on. Keep in mind also, that people just have better and worst days, so you will see some days all your scores just jump up by a few points, other days all the scores can go down. That’s normal behavior, however, we want to strive for improvement. Be honest with yourself when evaluating your performance. You are not trying to impress anyone in your trading journal, you want to be real with yourself because that is the only way you will be able to learn and improve.

After these short questions, it is a good idea to have a few open-ended questions, in particular related to what was hard today and where you feel like you could improve. We like to ask: One trade that I can learn from today, and what can I learn from it? Or how can I make tomorrow better?

Lastly, add a few questions to ensure that you do not leave any loose ends before you head off to rest. Questions such as: do any of my open positions have after-hours earnings? Are there any economic events happening after market close?

Putting it all together

By now you have pretty much all the key trading journal parts established and know what to focus on and what to add to each one. The only thing left to do is to find a medium for your journaling and you are off to the races. Most people might choose to use google sheets or excel, Others may create something in Notion. Some may just use a simple notebook. And some may want the feeling of premium vegan leather on their hands as they pick up The Ultimate Trading Journal which has all of these sections and more already designed in a neat and easy-to-use package. The choice is yours, and remember it is not important what you choose, what’s important is that you stick to journaling for the long haul, because then and only then you will see the absolutely incredible transformations journaling brings to your trading.