Trading journal examples: 7 filled-in entries worth copying

Every trade entry below uses the same handful of fields. The first half is facts your platform already knows; import them or copy them. The second half is judgement. That's where your minutes should go. If you want the reasoning behind each field, how to keep a trading journal goes through it.

• Facts: date and time, market and direction, size, entry, stop and exit, result in dollars and in R.
• Judgement: which part of the plan it was, followed the plan yes or no, a grade from A to F for execution, the mistake by name, one word for how you felt, and one line on what to keep or change.

The examples are written the way I'd want a student to write them, with round numbers so the maths is easy to follow. The markets are Micro Nasdaq (MNQ, $2 a point) and E-mini S&P (ES, $50 a point).

Nothing fancy, and that's the point. The trade has a home in the plan, the risk is written in dollars and in R, and the note doesn't second-guess a target that was hit. The "went for and against" line is your MFE and MAE. Over fifty trades it tells you whether your targets are too close and your stops too wide.

This is the entry most traders never write, and it's the most important one in the list. A loss with an A grade says your process held. If you only grade by P&L, this trade teaches you to doubt a setup that may be fine, and the trade in the next example teaches you nothing at all.

Three mistakes, one trade, and every one of them named the same way you'd name it next time. That matters more than it looks. After a month you can add up what "sized up after a loss" cost you, and that number is usually the one that gets a trader to change. If this one looks familiar, read how to stop revenge trading.

Write this as one trade, not three. One decision to get in, three decisions to get out. Many platforms export it as three rows, and a journal that counts three trades makes your win rate and your trade count lie to you. The mistake cost here is the $128 the plan would have made on the runner.

No trades doesn't mean nothing to write. The setups you saw and didn't take are half the story, and nobody logs them.

Keep the two apart. A missed setup is a mistake you'll want to count, the same as a moved stop. A good skip is the rule doing its job. Traders who only log taken trades never see either, and hesitation is one of the most common and least visible costs I see in student journals.

Example 1 had a home in the plan. This is that plan, written before the open. It takes five minutes, and it's what makes "followed the plan" a yes or no instead of a feeling.

Then after the close, the daily review takes each scenario and says what happened. A played and I traded it (example 1). B never came. C played from 11:00 and I stayed out. One trade, +2R, grade A, plan followed. That closeout is the line I read first when I look at a student's week. If the plan is useful, the closeouts will show it; if every day says "none of these played", the plan needs work, not the trading. There's a free trading plan template with this layout if you want to start on paper.

This is where the examples above pay off. Split by whether you followed the plan, the week stops being "a red week" and becomes "a green week with two trades I wasn't allowed to take". That's not a strategy problem, it's a rule to enforce, and it fits on one line. Write it as a rule with a number in it and check that one thing first next Friday.

• No plan, so there's no way to say whether it was a good trade or a lucky one.
• No size or stop, so no R. $400 on 1 contract and on 10 contracts are different trades.
• "Should have held longer" with no level to hold to. Next time you'll hold a loser instead.
• No grade and no mistake name, so in a month this entry adds nothing to any count.

It's not wrong to write this. It's just a diary. Rewrite it with the fields from example 1 and it becomes something you can learn from: which scenario, what size, where the stop was, did you follow the plan, and what grade.

Any format works if you fill it in the same day. In a spreadsheet, each table above is one row with the fields as columns; my free trading journal template already has the plan, grade and mistake columns and adds up what each mistake cost. In a notebook, keep the field names in the margin so every entry looks the same.

In Actal, the facts come in when you import from your platform (MNQ, size, prices, times, P&L, and R once you set your risk), and a trade closed in pieces comes in as one trade. You add the judgement: grade, mistakes picked from your own list, a note. Premarket plans have the A, B and C scenarios, the daily review closes them out and logs the setups you skipped, and the weekly review adds up what each mistake cost. It's free while in beta.

I'm Joakim. I trade index futures full time and coach traders one-on-one at Jusell Trading Academy. These seven are the kinds of entries I ask every student for, and the weekly review is where most of our sessions start.