If you spent half as much time figuring stuff out yourself as you did posting stupid questions on et you would be all set, man up son.
LOL. You are asking how to take notes? Take notes. I'm sure Evernotes or whatever can add value in some situations but at the click of a button now you can save a bunch of stuff that you will probably never look at again. And it is searchable? Never heard of Google? When I come across something interesting I just jot it down in a Word file. And still I don't use most of it. There is way too much information available, the key is not to capture as much of it as you can, but to focus on the very few things that really matter. You don't need any special tools for this, if anything I think they are likely to be a distraction.
Yes I also dislike the Cloud approach and pay a monthly rent forever. Also I am pretty sure with my big PDF files the monthly quota of 1000MB of premium account can be breached easily... I am also trying OneNote. But the problem is once you insert PDF files into OneNote, it's hard to search for annotations?
How do you create "point&click" in OneNote which upon clicking will bring you to the right section in a PDF file? What I am doing is inserting the pdf into OneNote. But OneNote only takes PDF files as images. Therefore there is no way OneNote can search within those images... But the benefit is that on the side of each imaged page I can write my own notes - these notes are searchable... I wish there is a way to index/search everything: 1. the original text-based pdfs; 2. the scanned image-based pdfs; etc....
Most trading related .pdf files are not large. Thus, you can easily copy the info from the pdf file or any other file and then paste it within a different type of file that allows index/searching of everything along with any notes you've added. My point is that you've made it clear that your sources of information is in different formats. To do what you want involving the indexing and ability to search any store information at any given time in the future... You're going to need to convert the information (copy/paste) into a format that allows such that can also be stored locally on your computer. Yeah, it's more work in comparison to leaving the info in its original format. I do such every trading day...copying important info from formats that's not easily index or searchable and then saving/pasting it into a format that's easily indexed and searchable. It's about 40 mins of work each day but well worth the effort because it gives me a wealth of information about any particular trading day. Yet, when I first started...it took about 1 1/2 hours...I've gotten more efficient over the years. My info goes back many many years stored on DVDs and at a private website/forum setup for indexing/searching (for my eyes only). Also, I'm not a big fan of storing links only of interesting information I consider important because some websites delete old info or archive it via a different link. That's why I prefer to copy the actual content along with the links and store it locally on my computer to be later archived in any format I want and stored on DVD. My archives go back as far as 15 years with only the recent 10 years being very detailed with a wealth of information for my eyes only. Mark
I like your approach. I am thinking of doing the same thing - keeping track of the markets for tens of years... I am sure this will lead to an edge i.e. you will at least be a more informed trader. But I hate the "copy&paste" approach. That's kind of slow. For example, if you have a 50-pg pdf research report, copying&pasting texts&images from the report to Word is going to be horrible... not to say every day we read a lot of such reports...
I use Treepad light (free) and OneNote. I take screenshots of the stats and equity curves for studies. I can also link the file in OneNote. Treepad is faster for taking notes. I previously used KeyNote but it is no longer supported. I tried some database type apps, see my blog entry below, but I've not stuck with any of those. I use Google mail and email to myself extensively. You may find that works for you, to open a gmail account, and email the notes to yourself. It is helpful when away from home computer. http://themarketpredictor.com/Details/2010/12/20/Journaling