What to Write in a Trading Journal (With Examples)
The first journal I kept was a graveyard of useless notes. "Missed the entry." "Should have held longer." "Emotional trade." I filled it out dutifully for six weeks and learned absolutely nothing — because I was recording observations, not data.
What to write in a trading journal is a question most traders never actually answer. They open a notebook, start scribbling, and end up with a log that feels productive but doesn't connect to better decisions. This post is about building a template that captures exactly what you'll want to analyze later.
Why Most Trading Journal Entries Are Useless
The standard version looks like this: date, instrument, entry price, exit price, P&L, one-line comment. That's a trade log, not a trading journal.
The problem is that the comment is written after the trade, about the outcome, not the decision. "Bad trade — should have cut it earlier" tells you nothing about the state you were in when you entered. It tells you what you think now, with hindsight applied.
A journal that only captures outcomes will never explain why you make the same mistakes in the same market conditions repeatedly. For that, you need the decision context — what was happening before you clicked.
What Should You Actually Log? (The Core Fields)
Every entry doesn't need to be long. Mine average about two minutes to fill out. These are the fields that have consistently produced patterns I could act on:
Before the trade:
- Setup type — the specific pattern or condition that triggered the entry (something filterable, not just "momentum")
- Conviction score (1–5) — how strongly did the setup meet your criteria before you entered?
- Pre-trade state — one word: focused, distracted, anxious, bored, rushed
The trade itself:
- Entry price, stop level, target level — not just entry; R:R is a data point you'll want later
- Planned vs actual exit — did you execute as intended, or did you move the stop or cut profit early?
After the trade:
- Outcome — win, loss, breakeven, and the actual dollar or point figure
- Execution quality (1–5) — separate from outcome; did you follow your rules regardless of what the market did?
- Post-trade reaction — one word: satisfied, frustrated, relieved, flat
The distinction between outcome and execution quality is one of the most valuable things you can track. A well-executed loss teaches you something useful. A poorly-executed win just reinforces bad behavior. Tracking your emotional state around each trade turns this from anecdotal to statistical over time.
Is a Template or Free-Form Better?
Both — at different layers of the same entry.
A structured template (fixed fields you fill in every time) builds the consistent dataset you need for pattern analysis. Without consistency, the data is too noisy to filter. This is what you want for daily logging.
A free-form section at the bottom captures what the template can't — the specific narrative of the trade, something you noticed mid-session, why this setup felt different from similar ones. One or two sentences is enough.
A good entry has both: template fields for data, a short note for context.
What Does a Good Trading Journal Entry Look Like?
Here's a real example (reconstructed):
Date: June 1, 2026
Instrument: NQ Futures
Setup: Opening range breakout above prior day high
Conviction: 4/5
Pre-trade state: Focused
Entry: 19,420 | Stop: 19,380 | Target: 19,500 (2:1 R:R)
Planned exit: At target
Actual exit: 19,492 — moved to trail before target, stopped out
Outcome: +1.8R actual (planned: +2R)
Execution quality: 3/5 — rule violation: moved stop early
Post-trade reaction: Annoyed
Context: Setup was clean, trend was clear. I trailed the stop because NQ had a brief pullback at 19,460 that spooked me. Post-hoc that was noise. Lesson: trust the target once the setup is confirmed and the trade is green.
That one entry tells you far more than "NQ, +72 points, should have held." It captures the rule violation, the emotional trigger, and a lesson — one you can search for the next time you're tempted to move a stop in a trending market.
How Often Should You Review What You've Written?
Daily is for logging. Weekly is for reviewing.
At the end of each week, filter your entries by execution quality and look at the bottom third. Not the losers — the poorly-executed trades, wins and losses alike. Those are the entries hiding your patterns.
Reviewing your trades systematically is a separate discipline from logging them, but it only works if the logs have enough structure to filter and sort. A notebook of free-form text is hard to review at scale — which is exactly the problem that structured trading journal apps solve over a spreadsheet.
Brett Steenbarger, who has coached professional and institutional traders for decades, makes this point consistently: the quality of self-review scales directly with the quality of what you captured in real time. You can't find patterns in vague notes.
The Minimum Viable Entry
If two minutes per trade feels like too much right now, start with just three fields:
- Setup type — what triggered your entry
- Execution quality (1–5) — did you follow your rules?
- Pre-trade state — one word
That's a 20-second entry. It's enough to start surfacing the patterns that are costing you money before you're even aware they exist.
Once you have two weeks of consistent data, you'll naturally want to add more fields — because you'll have seen what the data can tell you when it's structured.
MindTradr was built around this exact problem: a structured journal template that attaches to each trade, captures execution context and emotional state, and then surfaces the correlations automatically so you don't have to build a spreadsheet to find them. It's the tool I kept wishing existed when I was doing this in a notebook. If you want to try this system yourself, MindTradr is free to start.