Ditto - along with a fair number of your posts as well Personally I keep everything in Evernote. As it's easy to search, print off and export. Accessible from my phone, pc and laptop etc I've found that the importance of my Trade journal has lessened over the last few months. I conduct a review after each series of trades. Generate my stats, from that I can see if I need to tweak anything with my approach. The core of my journaling now is my Mental Analysis journal as @KDASFTG would put it. It's the only one I write in on a daily basis. And there's no way in hell I'd post that in public
I wish I had "journaling" when I started, one starting out are at huge disadvantage of not clearly knowing what might work or what will not work long term. I think it not so much what you are using to entry so long as it goes with the flow of what big brokerages are doing. You don't want to fight the volume, it is one thing to take a counter-trend trade when you have clear cut good reasons, but not when it "feels" that it should. Journals will keep you honest, you can get good ideas of what is wrong based on when you should not be taking a signal, that is a step many have no idea about. Just cause you have a signal, is it one you should be taking based on recent market structure. You also get an insight on how others trade, but almost all traders who been at it awhile have same basic rules of discipline. Longer I trade, more I realize it is 95% Discipline and 5% doing, have to have well back tested method, have nearly all the answers before the questions, but a Journal is good way to get more of the answers. You will have to have a hard skin, many who can't trade will say different things won't help you, use Ignore. And above all, when anyone tells you about something, back test it to make sure it works for you.
The main reason to start a journal is because you don't know everything. By sharing what you're doing, you are opening yourself up to outside input. Now some of that input might just be B.S. chatter, but all it takes is for one person to come along and give you a little spark of an idea that may end up permanently changing your trading for the better. When I was trading from my own home back in 1997, I learned two things real quick: Consistent profitable trading is not easy. Trading is lonely. And it was on those two premises that I started Elite Trader. And here we are 18 years later. So the whole premise of the site from the very beginning was "Traders helping Traders", or as the old saying goes, "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." If you want to start a private journal for your eyes only, that's more of a diary from my perspective, and you could do that with a pen and paper, or with MS Word on your local computer whenever you want, but that's not opening yourself up to be sharpened by others with more experience. But maintaining a public journal gives you several distinct advantages: You'll become a better communicator, which will lead to you getting better feedback, which will lead to your trading improving over time. It's like the old Proverb says, "Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed." If you make any mistakes along the way, your journal will serve as a guide for others to avoid those same mistakes. You'll build a thicker skin when it comes to making mistakes and have others critique them. This will lead you into a less-emotional mindset, which could very well be the one skill that keeps you sticking to your stops and not blowing out your account during a highly volatile period. And finally, as is always the case in life, what comes around goes around. If you endeavor to create an honest straightforward journal of your trades and mindset, you're going to help others, which will ultimately attract wisdom back to you in the form of sincere replies, or just by reading the journals of others and learning some new mental angles of thought about the markets. And hopefully over time, you'll piece together a successful trading model in your head that will work for you in the best way possible given your current education and abilities.
Maybe confirmation. It's nice to see others' flaws, loser post-mortems and general comments. When we play all alone in our little sandbox, it's easy sometimes to start thinking we're an extra-terrestrial with unique problems. It's reassuring to see the same mistakes in others, and how they're handling them. I enjoy @schizo's for the occasional personal state of mind comments. Done well, I'd think it could be neutral on that front: you log the bad with the good and anyone who's done any trading at all isn't likely to flat-out discourage you on the bad parts (and if some do, click "Ignore") nor praise you like a God for that big "right place, right time" winner.
Gosh, I really don't know...Did I win or lose? Did my horse have it's nose in front, or not. Watch and learn... over and over again. the only way to learn. Anyone else agree? Na zdrowie Tim