What kinds of journals do you people keep on your trades and or trading style? What have you found to be beneficial? and what a waste of time? S/R? Spreadsheets? Formulas? economic numbers? types of indicators in various differening markets? time of entires and exits? scaling? are you guys printing each trade up and pasting in your journals? or are you cutting and pasting in electronic form? writting reasons for trade? etc.?
Online Journal (I'm slow to update this): Time of entry/exit, entry/exit price, contract size, missed trade times, key trade, snagit image of realtime posted trade of the key trade in the chat rooms I moderate, total Emini points and brief commentary (copy and paste info from the personal journal). Personal Journal (updated every trading day): All the above, name of the trade signal, times of key economic releases, pivot point analysis, daily chart analysis (brief commentary of no more than 1 sentence), printed charts (1min, 3min, 15min), live-recordings of the realtime charts, live-recordings of the broker execution platform and pre-market, mid-day, post-market measurement of my blood pressure and heart rate. Note: I'm done with all the above by 5pm est. What I found to be a waste of time for me in the past that I no longer do or replaced with something from the above... Printing out my actual daily broker statement, printing out charts of something I don't trade, writing down on paper how I felt about each trade (I do this now in the chat room and it gets recorded via that method) et cetera. The less writing on paper I do and the more typying or copy/paste I do...the more efficient I am with my journals. The bigger the hard-drive...the better. Also, get a CDrw or DVDrw...preferably DVDrw and move info from your internal hard-drive to CD's or DVD's and you'll have a very nice personal library of info that will only help your trading after a few months. Last of all, someone once at ET asked me (I didn't respond because I don't know and need to look into because the question spooked me a little)... They asked...how long does the info stored on DVD...last? I always thought it was permanent and didn't degrade. P.S. If you leave a paper/digital trail in your trading...its much easier to go backwards to find trading problems and how to resolve them prior to the next trades. NihabaAshi
i was thinking during the day as i trade to use a vocie recording device to give my thoughts along with the trade. such as time, indicators, discretionary stuff, and other things. then at the end of the day i have notes in my own voice, then physically write them in my journal. anyone else using something similar?
You need a microphone, preferably a device attached to your head, so your hands are free. Windows itself includes a little recorder to produce audio files, but this program does not fit the bill. There are some cheap programs which will produce voice recordings in a more convenient way: they will start the recording when you start talking and stop when you stop talking (via a threshold value) so the files are kept manageable. They will also properly configure your audio devices, which seems not to be so easy ( I recently read a survey wherein Microsoft stated that 10% of all support requests refer to sound devices). This still leaves you with an audio file, you may convert it into a written journal manually. I was not satisfied with this method, maybe I'll try something like IBM Via Voice or Dragon next. regards Bernd Kuerbs