This Trading Journal will start here on Monday, the 26th. About Me: I've been demo trading the ES ever since February of this year. I started trading live with the micros last June. My goal is to get confident enough to trade live the ES next year. I trade only the morning session, between 6:15am to 9am PST. Purpose of Thread: This thread will be a trading journal of my live MES entries for the day. Topics Covered for Each Post: *The day of the week and my description of the morning trend. *Emoji for today's trading (with P&L for the day). 1. Pre-Market Outlook: 2. Pre-Market Bias: 3. My Thoughts during Trades (#of Trades: #): 4. What I Learned or To Focus More On: (coming in the afternoon) 5. After Reviewing-My-Video Thoughts: (#:##:## my video location) (coming in the evening) The Journal's Objective: To analyze my progress as a trader by "finding" my bad habits and "recognizing" my good ones. To The Reader: All comments and suggestions are welcomed, thanks!
Have you done a trade journal before...if so...how long did it last ? Will you be using a 3rd party professional trade journal software and this text journal at ET will be supplementing that journal ? Will you be showing screenshots of trades in your broker trade execution platform or will this journal just be text only ? wrbtrader
I've been journaling my day trades since March of this year. But it wasn't as thorough as now. I've been using the one described above for the past two weeks, and have been experiencing significant improvements. I will be posting up screen shots of my trades. I use the Ninjatrader 8 platform, so the indicators I use will be shown. No 3rd party journal software will be used, just snip shots of my charts on the screen. I average 1-3 trades per day, one day I did 5, and that took me all day to journal. This helps me to not overtrade. I forgot to add in the first post, that I use the ES to read the price action and volume. The pictures will be from the ES, and my live trades will be executed in the MES.
Good technique. I've found myself doing the same thing on the NQ/MNQ. The micros are still a bit "rough-around-the-edges" on the ladder and fills when compared to the parent instrument.
I spent a lot of time setting up ES charts and DOM to trade the MES..can be done by what is called "symbol mapping"..after many hours of testing with live data feeds..I found it to be a total waste of time..so much so that I now have just the MES charts..no DOM..no volume analysis..no T&S..just the plain old simple bar chart I predict that if you go down the route of trying to trade like the so called "professionals"..then you are doomed to failure..I hope you prove me wrong..but will be very surprised if you do if you take a different route..then..that can be a completely different story!!
Take it easy on me bro. Try to not knock me over at the beginning of my journal. What works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. Thanks for your 2 cents. I've heard it all, and I'm gonna follow my own plan. Let's just all get along right now. I hope you enjoy my entries next week.
This is the first time I've ever seen this little tibit written by anyone about one of the benefits to having a trade journal...using the trade journal to help limit overtrading so that you'll have less documentation...less work. It works especially when you know the mean (average) number of trades your trade method gives you. Thus, there's another benefit...you're more likely to only take trades within your trading plan because usually overtrading involves taking trades "outside" of the trading plan. wrbtrader