I just bought an annual subscription through Trademetria's Trading Journal to keep track of my daily trades and was wondering what information other more seasoned traders find pertinent and what they find irrelevant. What do you view as must have, not as important, and not important at all? How do you structure yours? How often do you review your trade journal and what do you find is most important to you to review in order to improve your trades? Since I began I currently only put my trade data and just write a few lines on weak points, missed opportunities, and blown trades. Thank you in advance.
Bugsy: I'm a Trademetria subscriber as well. I use Snip & Sketch to take screen shots of charts and annotate them and then post them in my Daily Journal. I use the Historical Performance tab to look at each day's P/L and each month's P/L. If you use Key Metrics tab, I track Win Rate, Win Average and Loss Average, and then scroll down to Weekly Progress to track P/L and Win Rate there. In the Daily Journal, I like to do a monthly recap and just make sure I record all of the major things from the month and any key insights. You could also do that on weekly basis. My basic daily journal entries consist of "What did I do well?" "What did I learn or what can I improve?" Don't beat yourself up on your misses and blown trades -- it's not good for your mental state to do that. Just identify what you can improve. Also, if you ever have any issues with importing or anything else, reach out to Thiago. He is a great guy and very responsive to issues. Feel free to PM me directly if you want to talk more. Best wishes!
Yeah Thiago is very responsive and friendly. Always replies quickly to any emails. Thank you for the insights. When you screenshot do you screenshot in the moment, like before it does whatever it will do, or do you screenshot both where you entered and what it ended up doing?
I usually do it after but then annotate it to show where I entered. What time frames are you usually trading?
%% Print out charts; 200 dma/other dmas, hi/low/close/volume/av volume/stops/profits/losses. Weekly/day/weekly. NYSE short ratio. SPY/QQQ/UPRO.......... Most of the stuff i trade/invest in , would be a little better off splitting orders on exits/ but i seldom do that...........................................................................
I strongly second what was stated by formikatrading. You gotta have screenshots of the way your charts or any other resource you're using in your trading...exactly what they looked like at the time of your trades versus taking a screenshot at the end of your trading day because that last screenshot will often look very different than the earlier screenshots. Also, if possible, use two different computers and put your charts and the screenshot making on one computer while your broker trade execution platform is on another computer. In addition, you can use an automated screenshot maker that takes it every set time of intervals. For example, it can take a screenshot every 5 minutes but obviously you'll need to go back at the end of your trading day to find the screenshots in your designated folder that correlate with the times of your trades. Then throw out (trash) the other screenshots you don't want. Also, most professional trade journal software will import your trades from the broker trade execution platform in real-time or designated for import at the end of the day. wrbtrader