What is a Trading Journal? [And Journal Template]

If you’ve only recently started trading, it can be difficult to identify the subliminal habits that constitute your trading strategy. Navigating your trades without a clear idea of what does and doesn’t work for you means you are, in a sense, trading blindly.

To help clarify their day trading tools and practices, many traders use day trading journal software or templates to bolster their trading success. Journaling successes and losses is one of the more common day trading tools as it allows traders to track their performance and manage risk.

Ultimately, a trader can use their journal as a way of measuring how they’re doing and what they could do differently.

A trading journal can also help traders prepare for new market conditions and risk factors by measuring progress and planning for the future.

Your trading journal may also provide notes on why you didn’t trade a particular session.

There are many ways to keep a trading journal. Some traders use Excel or Google Sheets, others might use software designed for trading journals.

You could even keep notes using a pen and paper if you wanted to. However, one of the benefits of using a spreadsheet or software is that you can quickly calculate figures. For example, if you wanted to know the average size of your winning trades, your day trading journal software can easily supply you with your answer.

When Is It Time to Upgrade Your Trading Journal?

There comes a point in every trader’s journey when a basic spreadsheet just doesn’t cut it anymore. If you’re finding that your trading has grown more complex or you need deeper insights than manual calculations can offer, it may be time to look into dedicated trading journal software.

Consider making the transition when:

• You want to analyze your trades with advanced metrics, charting, and automated summaries.
• You find manual data entry or analysis too time-consuming or prone to errors.
• You’re eager to review specific trades, replay your decision-making, and pinpoint patterns over time.
• You wish to build and track custom trading plans or strategies within a single platform.
• Your trading decisions would benefit from features like performance dashboards, risk calculators, or trade tagging filters.

Tools such as Edgewonk, TraderSync, or even custom-built apps allow for more robust tracking and analysis than Excel or Google Sheets. They can help you uncover nuances in your process, automate your data collection, and provide clear visualizations of your performance trends.

If you’re looking to refine your edge, manage risk more precisely, or simply save time, upgrading to specialized software might be your next move.

There are a number of benefits to keeping a trading journal. These range from understanding and refining your trading, to controlling emotion and discipline.

Below are some of the major benefits of keeping a trading journal:

If you don’t reflect on your trading, then you won’t know what works and what doesn’t.

Finding trades with the best success rate, allows you to focus on and refine your strategy and monitor its development.

You might think a particular type of trade is most successful when in fact there are better setups that are already working for you.

By finding out which parts of your strategy work, you can build on the skills associated with them. Understanding what’s not working will help you eliminate any weaknesses.

If you find which parts of your strategy work you can build on that skill. Understanding what’s not working will help you eliminate those weaknesses.

This will help you build a stronger trading strategy with fewer weak points. You make your decisions based on data, not your opinion which may be biased or just wrong.

Along the same lines, a trading journal helps you measure how well your trading strategies work.

You will be able to put percentages and dollar figures to your performance, and compare results in an organised layout.

This can tell you whether you’re meeting your trading goals. You can track this performance along your journey to visualise your improvement.

No two traders are alike and we all have our own strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to recognise those strengths and weaknesses and actively tailor your strategies around them.

Using your trading journal, you will be able to identify patterns. You’ll notice what leads to your winners and to your losses.

Is there a particular area you need to work on? What strengths should you be focusing on? Do you need to drop something from your strategy entirely? Should you consider further stock exchange training?

You should already know the rules of your trading strategy and be able to identify when you do the wrong thing.

Being truthful and committing mistakes to a trading journal will force you to acknowledge those mistakes.

This is your chance to analyse why you made that mistake and what you should have done differently.

Be honest with yourself and think about what you did wrong in a trading session. This will ensure you are aware of your mistakes and help you own and rectify those mistakes.

When you consistently review your trades, all of your mistakes and rule breakings are on display. If you’re honest with yourself, you have nowhere to hide from them.

It’s especially important to ensure you follow the rules of your trading strategy. If you identify that you have broken a rule, note the emotion that caused you to break it.

A trading journal isn’t just a place for statistics. It’s also used to understand your emotions and the thought processes behind your decisions.

Looking at why you made a mistake is as important as identifying that you made it. If you don’t know the reasons for your mistakes, it is difficult to eliminate them from your behaviour. Verbalising your emotions allows you to objectively recognise them, which in turn will allow you to assess whether they are positive or negative in their nature.

Consider the following examples to note:

A risk management system in trading is highly important. Risk management is often the difference between being profitable or not.

A trading journal will help you understand what risk you put into the market and what reward you reap.

If you notice an imbalance between what you are risking and what you are making, then you know you have a problem.

Calculate your average winners and losers and ensure the winners are larger. Doing this makes it easier to become a profitable trader.

Adjust your risk if necessary, so that you take smaller positions. It’s important to note that without a trading journal you might not recognise when you have larger losses than winners.

Understanding the R-Multiple

To truly measure your trading performance, it’s helpful to look beyond just dollars and cents. Enter the R-multiple, a crucial metric for traders. The R-multiple simply represents your actual profit or loss on a trade divided by your original risk.

For instance, if you risk $100 on a trade and end up making $1,000, your R-multiple is 10. This is a more meaningful way to assess your trades than simply looking at the end profit, because it accounts for the consistency and size of your risks versus your rewards.

Why is this important? Because tracking your R-multiples over time shows whether your trading strategy is consistently producing bigger wins than losses. It reveals not just if you’re making money, but how well you’re managing your risk relative to potential rewards. This way, you can refine your approach and build a more resilient trading system.

At the end of this article you will find a link to your free day trading journal template to get you started.

This is an example of how I would lay out a trading journal, but everyone is different. It’s a good idea to also know how to make one from scratch, even if you already have access to day trading journal software.

Your trading journal may be different based on the type of trading you do (day trading vs swing trading) or the markets you trade.

The reason to use a spreadsheet or specialised software is that they provide calculations. You want to be able to store your data but also quantify certain things.

There are many different ways to create a day trading journal, but the main things to note are the following:

Breaking Down Key Journal Sections

Basic Information:

Start with the essentials—the date you made the trade, the ticker symbol, currency pair, or market. State whether it was a long or short position. This helps you quickly scan your journal and identify patterns over time.

Entry Details:
Record exactly when and how you entered the trade: entry price, entry time, and your position size (the number of shares, contracts, or lots). Be sure to note your stop loss here as well, so you have a clear record of your risk parameters.

Exit Details:

Just as important as your entry, track your exit price, exit date/time, and whether you hit your profit target or had to close out early.

Commissions and Fees:

Log any trading fees or commissions. These small amounts can add up and impact your net results, so don’t ignore them.

Profit/Loss and Performance:

Note your profit or loss in both dollar terms and as a percentage of your account. If your journal allows, track whether each trade was a winner or a loser at a glance.

Risk and Reward:

Calculate how much you risked on the trade (for example, as a percentage of your trading account) and how much you stood to gain. Some traders also like to include the R-multiple—your profit or loss divided by your initial risk. This gives you a sense of whether your winners make up for your losers.

Screenshots of Your Charts:

A picture is worth a thousand words. Attach screenshots of your charts at entry and exit, marking up exactly what you saw and why you made your decisions.

Notes and Emotions:

Use these sections for qualitative details. Jot down anything noteworthy about the trade: Did you follow your plan? Did market conditions shift unexpectedly? How were you feeling—nervous, confident, impulsive? Over time, these reflections can help you notice psychological patterns that impact your trading.

By including all of the above, your trading journal becomes a powerful tool for growth—helping you spot what works, what doesn’t, and how to refine your process.

Steps for Entering and Updating Trades in Your Journal

Maintaining a detailed trading journal is straightforward once you have your template set up. Here’s a step-by-step process to help you log your trades throughout their lifecycle:

1. Start of Trade
   Begin by entering essential trade details:

   • Date and time of entry
   • Market session and conditions
   • Asset ticker or market symbol
   • Direction (long/short) and trading setup
   • Conviction level and position size
   • Percentage of account risked
   • Entry price, stop loss, and profit target
     Most spreadsheet templates provide dedicated columns for each of these fields.

2. During the Trade
   As the trade develops, revisit your journal:

   • Update any adjustments you make, such as moving stop loss or scaling in/out of a position
   • Use the notes section to record observations, strategies, or market behavior you notice
   • Document your emotional state to capture key insights into your decision process

3. Closing the Trade
   After exiting, add the following:

   • Exit date, time, and price
   • Calculation of profit/loss (both in dollars and percentage terms)
   • Commissions or fees incurred
   • Annotate screenshots to visually mark up the charts and highlight what transpired

4. Review and Reflect
   Once the trade is fully logged:

   • Review your profit/loss and compare to your risk management parameters
   • Make a note of lessons learned or recurring patterns—this is crucial for growth
   • If your template includes auto-calculated stats (like win rate or risk/reward ratio), take a moment to review these and adjust your approach if needed

Remember, the goal is not just to record what happened but to use your journal as a tool for deeper learning. The more diligently you update your trading journal throughout each trade, the more valuable insights you’ll gain over time.

To get you started with creating your own trading journal you can download our trading journal template.

Feel free to add, remove, or change any of the contents of the trading journal to fit your trading.

Even if it does not match your trading style entirely, this template should at least provide you with a good starting point for creating your own trading journal.

A day trading journal isn’t a doom and gloom tool used to point out your mistakes. Look at the things you are doing well as well as the things you are not.

Is there a certain trading pattern that you have a high success rate trading? Focus on finding that set up.

Congratulate yourself on what you are doing right

If you’re noticing similarities in your losing trades, that’s good. It will be easier to work on eliminating those factors.

There are a few things that you can consider when thinking about your losses:

It’s useful to create a sort of ‘dashboard’ with a high overview of important information.

Rather than trawl through entries of data, it’s nice to get quick figures. You might want to know your average winner and average loser for example.

If you have months’ worth of data in your journal it will be very difficult to find quick answers to certain statistics.

One of the first things beginner traders should do when learning to trade is to organise their day trading journal.

It’s likely that a beginner is learning more than one or two stock patterns or set up and they need to know which works best for them.

A trading journal is a must if you want to understand the context of your trading, and how you’re actually performing.

To summarise, you use a trading journal to:

• Log your trading activity
• Develop and test different trading plans/strategies
• Pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in your trading
• Develop discipline
• Understand your emotions and psychology of trading
• Track and improve risk management

Want more insights into how to better develop day trading strategies as a beginner? or how to trade Futures, consider signing up to one of our day trading courses for beginners, designed to provide beginner traders with the tools and strategies they need to start their trading portfolio on a strong note.