Trading journal

It can't be emphasized enough how important it is to cultivate a trading journal.

The underlying principle is that the learning curve is extensive before consistency sets in. Typically ten years pass before a trader reaps in their first successes. Consequently, ten years of hard work have passed, but the brain selectively has erased the many hardships and devastating experiences within this period. The result is your memory has little recollection of what the market has presented hurdles and how you have overcome these hurdles.

Nevertheless, one can only learn from mistakes and measuring progress. A journal is essential to be a reference guide on methods and solution processes for mastering success.

Another vital aspect of a journal is catching various cycles of market behavior that can be vastly different and not intuitively remembered once they reoccur. This saves the avid learner (time not being on your side initially) much time to go back to a similar market behavior of the market to refresh one's mind on how already in the past presented problems had been solved at the time.

Yet another aspect is that the whole field is counterintuitive, as many of your memories might be playing tricks on your mind since they do not correctly reflect the truth of the past.

A life worth living is worth recording, and the extension of that saying should certainly apply to a man's serious dedication to acquiring a skill, if not mastery, in a specific field.

Once journaling dives into more detail, like a small report on individual trades and trade sample sizes, it might bring forth personal personality traits, strengths, and weaknesses regarding one's execution in the form of time of day or time of the week and so forth.

This form of execution journaling might shed light on seasonality, typically too lengthy and data-dense for a mind throughout the year to objectively reflect upon if many trades are taken.

The separation of planning, system development, implementation, and then measuring and reflecting is the most helpful sequence for making progress and improving through measuring one's skill set.

Journaling in detail on trades does not only bring forward psychological shortcomings. Still, it can help to accurately measure performance not based on P&L but on other aspects of trading more essential for harnessing consistency and smooth equity curve establishment.

The biggest gain of journaling is the process of writing itself. Something magical happens with writing, like erasing a hard drive and an emotional release. Trading bears so many hardships that most traders go through depression, feelings of unworthiness and guilt, and blame, and many more low-frequency energies are not rare to be found. A sense of frustration and isolation aren't rare, and the writing process allows a shedding of unwanted feelings and emotional turmoil.

The mind sorts itself out, and this sort of bookkeeping presents the opportunity to own one's actions and past.

This way of accountability and self-worth reflected allows one to progress from a more proper place emotionally and avoids a feeling of insanity: insanity is defined as expecting different results doing the same thing over and over again.

Writing supports asking quality questions and looking at problems from other angles and, as such, manifesting answers and steps forward by having in black and white narratives of points in time that one can go back to and reflect on what needs/ could be done next.

Business plans, goal setting, and other ways of projecting into the future and measuring towards the past allow for living the here and now in a more precise way rather than just a reactionary behavior in a field that is counterintuitive in principle, most often triggering unwanted and unproductive responses.

There is much more than mentioned above to this subject.

We recommend partaking in this exercise to realize how important this part of trading homework is in your progress towards success and maintenance of the pillars of success once achieved.