What the journal contains
- Open positions. Track what you hold now, along with the risk levels you set for each position.
- Closed trades. Review completed trades and their realised outcomes. Log entries and exits so reports can be built from them, and import trades in bulk.
- Playbooks. Keep your setups, entry rules and risk criteria in one place, and compare returns, drawdown and performance across them.
- Performance reports. Summaries such as win rate and maximum drawdown, plus guidance flags when a measure drifts, for example when drawdown is large or the win rate is low.
Journal entries, live positions, playbooks and analytics stay private to your account, and you need to sign in to log trades and view your history.
What to record for each trade
A journal is only as useful as its entries. Record the information you will need when reviewing, ideally at the time of the trade.
| Field | Why it helps |
|---|---|
| Instrument, side, size, entry and exit | The basic facts that reports are built from. |
| Playbook or setup | Lets you compare results by strategy instead of only in total. |
| Planned stop and target | Shows whether you followed your risk plan or changed it mid-trade. |
| Reason for the trade and what you expected | Separates a good decision from a lucky outcome. |
| What happened and what you would change | Turns each trade into a lesson you can search later. |
A weekly review routine
- Start with the numbers: win rate, average win against average loss and maximum drawdown. A win rate on its own says little without the size of wins and losses.
- Split results by playbook. A strategy that works can hide inside an average that includes one that does not.
- Read the losses first. Were they planned risk, or did you move a stop, size up or trade outside your rules?
- Judge the process separately from the profit and loss, and write down one rule to keep and one to change.
- Re-check whether recent drawdown is within what you planned, and reduce size or tighten selection criteria if it is not.
Limits
A journal records what you tell it, so it is only as honest as your entries. Small samples mislead: a playbook with a handful of trades cannot be judged, and results in one market regime may not carry to another. The reports are descriptive and are not advice. Use them to improve your own process, and see the guides on the tools you trade for the setups themselves, such as the opening range breakout guide or the VWAP trading guide.