What to write down after every trade: a 7-field checklist

A trading journal lives or dies on the twenty seconds after a trade closes. Ask for too much in that moment and the entry never gets written. Ask for too little and there is nothing to learn from later. These are the seven fields that earn their place: what each one costs you to fill in, and what it gives back when you look at thirty trades together. At the end there is a section on fields you can safely skip, and a checklist you can copy.

The examples below use trades from LogBook's demo account. The instruments are real Swedish names; the trades and the numbers are made up.

1. Instrument

What you traded, by the name you use for it: Saab B, Volvo B, OMXS30, DAX. Two seconds. Later, this is the first thing you group by. Most traders have one or two instruments that quietly eat their month, and they do not know which until the journal lines them up side by side. If you trade certificates or minis, log the underlying (DAX) rather than the product code, so that fifty different turbos on the same index end up in one row. LogBook's Avanza scan does that for you when it reads a product name.

2. Entry

The price you got in at, and ideally the time. Five seconds if you look at your fill, less if you remember it. Entry alone is not very interesting, but entry together with exit tells you how far a trade went for you, and entry time is what makes a breakdown by hour possible. A trader who learns that everything before 09:15 loses has learned something worth more than any indicator, and it takes a time stamp to see it.

3. Exit

The price you got out at, and the time. With entry, this gives the gross result, the holding time, and whether you held to the plan or bailed. If you scale out, log the average, or log it as one trade with the final result. The journal does not need every fill; it needs the shape of the trade. Demo example: Saab B bought at 512.40, sold at 507.40, a hundred shares. That is the kind of plain fact the field is for.

4. Fees

Courtage, both legs. Three seconds, and the field most often left empty. Per trade it is small. Per month, for an active trader, it is often the difference between a green and a red total, and leaving it out makes every number in the journal flatter than reality. In the demo example above the trade lost 500 kr on price and 21.54 kr on fees, so the result that counts is minus 521.54 kr, not minus 500.

5. Grade

A, B or C for how well you executed your plan. Not for how the trade turned out. This is the field that turns a list of results into something you can learn from, so it gets its own section below. It takes two seconds and one honest moment.

6. Setup

A short name for the pattern you traded: opening range breakout, pullback to VWAP, failed breakdown. Pick from a list you keep short. This is the field that lets a breakdown answer the question that matters most: which of the things I do actually work, in my hands, on my instruments? A setup with twenty trades and a negative expectancy is a setup you stop trading. You cannot see that without the tag.

Resist the urge to tag everything from day one. Tag a setup when you have traded it enough times to describe it in a sentence. Until then, put the description in the notes.

7. One line of notes

One sentence, in your own words, written before the story forms: why you took it, or what you saw. Entered late after the move, no plan written down. Waited for the pullback, took the planned target. Ten seconds. Later, this is the field you read most, because it is the only one that remembers what you were thinking. When a setup's numbers go wrong, the notes tell you whether the setup failed or you did.

If you want to record how you felt, do it here, in words. Took it angry after the stop-out is useful. A 3 on a 10-point scale is not.

Fields you can skip

• Emotion on a scale of 1 to 10. It feels scientific and tells you nothing you can act on. A word in the notes does more.
• Market conditions essays. Trend, range, news day, volatility regime. By the time you have written it, the next trade is gone. If a condition matters, it becomes a rule in your plan, not a paragraph in the log.
• Screenshots of every timeframe. One chart, the one you traded from, with your entry and exit visible. Paste it if it takes one keystroke. Five charts per trade is a reason to stop journaling.
• Position size as a separate field, if you log the result in kronor and your risk per trade. R does that work for you.
• Anything you add because a template had it. If you cannot say what question a field answers after thirty trades, it does not belong in your twenty seconds.

Grade: a measure of process, not of results

The grade is the one field where the rule has to be stated clearly, because everything in you wants to grade by outcome. The rule: an A is a trade you would take again exactly the same way, even if it lost. A C is a trade you should not have taken, even if it won. B is in between: right idea, sloppy execution, or a plan followed with one deviation.

Why does this matter? Because results are noisy and process is not. Five trades can lose for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Five C-grade trades always have something to do with you. After thirty trades, a breakdown by grade answers two questions no P&L can: is my plan any good (how do the A-grades do as a group), and how much is my lack of discipline costing me (the gap between A and C). Both demo trades above are a B and a C for exactly these reasons: the Saab trade was planned and sized right and simply lost, the DAX mini was chased with no plan.

Grade honestly or not at all. A journal full of A-grades that lose money is either a bad plan or a dishonest grader, and only one of those is fixable from the journal.

The checklist

Copy this somewhere you will see it. The whole thing should take about twenty seconds.

1. Instrument: the name you use. Underlying, not product code.
2. Entry: price and time.
3. Exit: price and time.
4. Fees: both legs, in kronor.
5. Grade: A, B or C for the process. Would you take it again the same way?
6. Setup: one short name from your list, or leave empty until you have one.
7. One line: why you took it, before the story forms.

Optional, if it costs nothing: a chart screenshot and your risk in kronor, so the result also shows in R. Everything else waits until you have thirty trades and a question. Our guide to keeping the habit covers what to do with those thirty trades, and the spreadsheet template has these columns ready if you would rather start in a sheet.