You’re on a trading journey much like most others who enter the world of FOREX trading with the hope of becoming wealthy and building castles in the air, but if you follow their lead, you’ll join the 99% of traders who fail.

So learning what the top 1% of successful traders practice is crucial to your development, and one such practice is to JOURNAL.

And my question to you is, do you journal?

Why don’t you, if the answer is no?

If I gave two equal traders with equal intelligence access to the same information, but one journaled and the other didn’t, the one with a journal would be way ahead of the other, provided that trader knew how to do it and did it correctly.

There is one main reason why you and everyone else should be keeping a trade journal:

To eliminate mistakes

The more you journal your trade, the more you will understand your weaknesses, and the better you could increase the possibility of successful trades.

Let’s start by creating a google spreadsheet, with 5 columns.

First Column – Currency Pairs

The main purpose of having a currency pair column is not only to act as a reference for your trades.

It also helps to identify your strength in certain pairings, because different pairings have a different levels of volatility. You might also be surprised that you might be more sensitive to certain pairings when you’re trading with the combination on the fundamentals.

Second Column – Long/Short

In column two, indicate whether you went long or short; this is just to make the entire reference entry easier.

Third Column – Pips Gain/Loss

Now, in column three, record the number of pips gained or lost in the trade. Do not do this in terms of dollars, but rather in terms of actual pips.

Column three should contain the net pips you have gained or lost during the trade. This will provide you with an overview of your overall profitability, and consistency.

Fourth Column – Screenshot

Column four is where I believe your journal will differ from most others but in a good way. In column four, please include a link to a screenshot of the trades you made. So go to a site like Imgur and sign up so you can have a screenshot with a link, and then put that link in column four so you can always refer to it.

Draw a line connecting the points where you entered and exited.

This is significant because you can then see how the trade occurred from a nice zoomed-out perspective. And did you profit at the appropriate time? Did you place your stop loss in an appropriate location? Was it a good thing you put it there, and was it a good thing you profited when you did? Was it a bad decision?

All of this is what the screenshot would answer when done appropriately. This is a much easier way to go to your chart and put those lines in and then take a screenshot of it and then always have a link to that screenshot right there.

Or you keep the screenshots on your laptop with proper labeling so you can always refer to them.

Fifth Column – Comments

Then there is your comments section in column five.

What you do here is that if the trade went off without a hitch and you made a nice profit, you don’t have to leave a comment. It simply means you followed your trading system, which is to be expected over time. That is not a mistake that we are attempting to correct.

By the same token, if it’s a loss, it’s simply a loss because you followed your system exactly as it was supposed to, but the price didn’t go your way. That, too, does not require explanation. That’s just you going with the flow. There will be setbacks.

The purpose of the comment section is to point out an error that you made.

Did you allow your emotions to get in the way of allowing your trade to run its course? Was there more money to be made but you didn’t get it because you stopped trading too soon? Did you lose money because you traded right into a major news event? And the news that didn’t go as planned? Did you disregard any of your trading components?

This is the most important part of your trading journal is the comments section because it is the one piece of information that you will need to refer to in order not to make the same mistake twice.

If you make the same mistake in the comment section in a subsequent trade, you need to stop and think about what you’re doing because you’re making the same mistake over and over again, which is causing a real problem.

It makes no difference what or how much you learn if you keep making the same mistakes.

A good trading journal will not only reveal this to you, but it will also help you eliminate those errors. When you can put together a system that has great trade entries, and tight money management, and you’re not making stupid mistakes, the possibilities are limitless.

Have fun trading!

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