How to Keep a Trading Journal: What to Record and How to Review It
By DigiCools Team ·
Most traders remember their big wins and big losses, but very few remember the hundreds of ordinary trades in between. A trading journal is a record of every trade so you can review your own decisions with facts instead of memory.
This article is about record-keeping only. It is not investment advice, and a journal does not guarantee any trading result. Trading involves risk of loss.
What to record for every trade
Keep the same fields for every trade so you can compare them later.
The basics
- Date and time of entry and exit
- Instrument (stock, index, option contract) and direction (long/short)
- Entry price, exit price and quantity
- Charges and taxes (brokerage, STT, exchange fees)
- Net profit or loss
Your plan
- Setup: the pattern or reason you took the trade
- Planned stop-loss and target before entering
- Risk per trade: how much you were prepared to lose, in rupees and as a percentage of capital
What actually happened
- Did you follow your plan? (Yes / No)
- If not, what did you change and why?
- A screenshot of the chart at entry and exit
Your state of mind
A short note on how you felt: calm, rushed, frustrated after a loss, overconfident after a win. These notes often explain mistakes better than the price data does.
How to review your journal
Set aside time once a week. Look for patterns in your own data, for example:
- Which setups have worked best for you so far, and which have not?
- Do you follow your plan more on some days or times than others?
- How often do you move a stop-loss or exit early?
- Are charges a large share of your results when you trade frequently?
Write down one specific change to test next week, then check whether it helped.
Common mistakes
- Only recording winners. A journal with missing trades gives a misleading picture.
- Filling it in days later. Details and emotions are forgotten quickly.
- Too many fields. If the journal takes too long, you will stop using it.
- Never reviewing it. The value comes from the weekly review, not the logging.
A ready-made journal
Our trading journal spreadsheets for Excel and Google Sheets include these fields and calculate P&L automatically, and the Indian F&O journal also works out brokerage, STT and other charges for each trade, so you can focus on recording and reviewing. They are record-keeping tools only and do not give trading signals or advice.