How to keep a trading journal: what to log
Almost everyone starts a journal; few get it to the point where it pays off — usually because they log either too little or far too much. Here are the fields that actually matter.
Short version. A useful trading journal is seven required fields: date and time, instrument, direction, risk in percent, result in R, setup and session. Everything else gets added only once you can name the question that field is going to answer.
What a journal is for
A journal has one job: to answer "which of the things I do makes money, and which loses it". Your broker's trade history doesn't answer that — it shows that a trade happened, not why you entered. Without the reason for the entry, statistics are useless: you know the outcome but not what to repeat.
Hence the rule that saves months: log the decision, not the result. The platform remembers the result anyway.
The seven fields a journal can't work without
| Field | Why |
|---|---|
| Date and time | Ties the trade to a session and to the news. Without time, half the conclusions are impossible |
| Instrument | A breakdown by instrument almost always exposes one or two that lose consistently |
| Direction | Most traders are lopsided: longs work and shorts don't, or the reverse |
| Risk, % | Without it, results aren't comparable to each other |
| Result in R | Profit in units of risk rather than currency, so trades on different account sizes weigh the same |
| Setup | The key field. It's what tells you which of your entries actually works |
| Session | Asia, Frankfurt, London and NY move differently and pay differently |
These seven are enough to calculate win rate, average RR, profit factor and drawdown, and to break the result down by setup, instrument and session — which covers nearly every reason people start a journal in the first place.
What to add next
Once the seven basics fill themselves in without effort, add the three that produce the most surprising conclusions:
- Bias — the direction you expected for the day, decided before the entry. "Entries against my own bias" is almost always the most expensive line in a journal.
- Entry screenshot. In a month you won't remember what you saw on the chart; from a screenshot it takes a second to tell your setup from a stretch.
- Emotion. Not "mood" but your state at entry: calm, rushing, revenge after a stop, fear of missing the move. This field answers what each of those costs — and the numbers are usually unpleasant.
What not to log
Journals die of two things: ten fields that have to be filled in by hand, and fields nobody ever calculates anything from.
- Long notes instead of fields. "Entered on the break but a bit early" will never appear in any statistic. The same thing split into a "setup" field and a "mistake" field will.
- Just-in-case fields. If you can't name the question a field answers, it gets filled in for two weeks and stays empty after that.
- Currency instead of percent. Top the account up once and all your previous results in dollars become incomparable.
How not to quit after two weeks
The real reason journals get abandoned isn't laziness, it's friction: open the database, find the right table, fill in a dozen fields. The further the entry is from the moment of the trade, the less likely it ever happens.
So logging has to take seconds. In StatsAI you can send the trade to the Telegram agent right after closing it — as text or a screenshot — and the journal sorts the fields out itself. The rest, from statistics to field combinations to rule checks, the journal does on its own.
What to do with the records
Look at three things once a week:
- Breakdown by setup. Which setup is positive and which is negative over 20+ trades.
- Combinations. Not single fields but their pairings: "London + break of structure", "shorts on US100 during Asia". The most expensive leaks live in combinations, because each field looks fine on its own.
- Trades outside your rules. If their share of the losses is higher than their share of the trades, the problem is discipline rather than the system — which is good news, because it's faster to fix.
A journal that merely accumulates records is useless. A useful one produces one conclusion and one change to your rules every week.
updated October 27, 2026