What to actually track in a trading journal
Entry, exit and P&L are what your broker already knows. The fields that change your behaviour are the ones you have to write down yourself.
Your broker statement already records every fill. Re-typing it into a spreadsheet produces a slower copy of something you can download, which is why most trading journals are abandoned inside a month: they cost effort and return nothing the statement did not already say.
A journal earns its keep by recording what the statement structurally cannot — the reasoning, the state you were in, and the rule you did or did not follow.
The half you should never type by hand
Prices, sizes, fees and timestamps should be imported. Typing them is a source of errors and a reason to quit. tradempower parses 10 broker CSV formats directly, matches fills into round-trip positions, and skips anything already imported — so re-importing an overlapping statement is safe. See the full list of supported formats.
The half that changes your behaviour
These are the fields worth the friction, roughly in order of how much they tend to reveal:
- The thesis, written before entry. One sentence. If you cannot write it, that is the finding.
- Which playbook strategy this was — and which version of it, since your rules change over time.
- Whether you broke a rule, and specifically which one. Not a mood, a rule.
- Your planned stop and target at entry, so the exit can be judged against the plan rather than against hindsight.
- The emotional state you entered in. Coarse is fine; consistent matters more than precise.
- A chart screenshot at the moment of the decision, which is the only record of what you were actually looking at.
Write it before you know the outcome
A thesis recorded after the exit is a story about why you were right or unlucky. It is not evidence. The entire diagnostic value of a journal depends on the note being written while the outcome is still unknown, which is why the entry note and the review note should be separate fields and never edited together.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.James Clear, Atomic Habits
None of it works without the review
Recording is the cheap half. A journal nobody reads is a diary. Set a fixed weekly slot to read the week back — the habit is what converts the record into a decision, and it is covered in reviewing your week.
If you want the imported half handled for you, start a free trial and upload a statement — no card required.