Journaling
& Review

A Journal Is Not A P&L Record

Your platform already keeps a P&L record. It tells you what happened: what you entered, what you exited, and what it came to. It is accurate, and it is nearly useless for getting better, because it cannot tell you why.

A journal answers two other questions. Why did you take the trade, and did you do what you said you would? Those are the only questions you can act on. You cannot change what the market did. You can change whether your entries had a level behind them, whether your stops sat behind structure, and whether you let a plan finish.

The Grade Is Assigned Before The Outcome

Every trade gets one grade: A+, A, B or C. It is assigned at entry, while the result is still unknown, and it is built from four checks that you can answer at that moment.

• Was there a named level, and not mid-range?
• Did a trigger fire before you entered?
• Is the stop behind structure, rather than inside the noise?
• Does the size match the plan for that stop distance?

All four, with a fill close to the price you intended, is an A+. All four is an A. Three of four, with no breach of the stop or the size, is a B. Two or fewer, or any breach of the stop or the size, is a C.

Nothing in that list mentions how the trade ended, and that is deliberate. A losing trade can be an A+: the plan was sound and the market did not cooperate. That is normal and expected. A winning trade can be a C, and that is the more useful signal. It means you were paid for something you would not want to repeat, and a win like that teaches the wrong lesson more convincingly than a loss ever could.

The Execution Mark Comes After The Exit

The second record is the execution mark, and it is made after the trade is over. It asks one question: did the exit follow the plan?

Pass means the exit was one the plan allowed: the target, a planned scale, a thesis invalidation you set at entry, the stop, or the end of the session. Fail means it was anything else. You moved a working target, you tightened the stop for reasons you had not written down, or you got out on feel.

Keep the mark apart from the grade. If you mark the exit while you are still grading the entry, the result leaks backward. A trade that ran well makes the entry feel better than it was, and a trade that stopped out makes it feel worse. Grading before and marking after is what keeps each one honest.

The Cell That Teaches Most: Good Plan, Bad Finish

Put grade and mark side by side and you get a board of combinations. The most instructive one is a high grade with a failed mark. Right setup, right level, right size, wrong exit.

That is a different problem from a bad plan, and it needs a different fix. A bad plan is a selection problem: you are taking trades that are not there, so the work is upstream, at the level and the trigger. A good plan with a bad finish is a discipline problem: the read was fine and you broke it afterward, so the work is downstream, in what you do while the trade is open. If you treat both the same way you will fix the wrong thing, and probably change a setup that was working.

The reverse cell is worth a look too. A low grade with a passed mark means you executed a poor plan faithfully. That is still a plan problem, and the clean exit does not redeem it.

What To Record And What To Skip

Record what you decided, and where. The setup, the level, the trigger, the stop, the target, the size, the intended price and the time. Every one of these exists before the trade resolves, which is why you can write it down honestly.

Skip anything you would have to invent later. How confident you felt, what the market was "obviously" doing, why you really got out: if you did not write it at the time, you are reconstructing it, and reconstruction bends toward the outcome. A field you fill in from memory is a field that agrees with the result.

The exit fields are the exception, but only because they are facts: the exit price, the time, what the trade did against you and for you. Fill them in when the trade closes. If you cannot say what happened, leave the field empty. An empty field is a smaller problem than a made-up one.

Your Trades Are Counted Apart From Any Backtest

As in Module 01, your own executions are a separate count. A backtest assumes a perfect trader who takes every signal at the stated price. Your journal records the real one, who skips some and hesitates on others. Blending the two hides the gap between them, and that gap is the thing you are trying to measure.

The same applies to simulated trades. A simulator fills a limit order the moment price touches it, and where in the level you get filled is the variable that decides whether a trade works. So sim trades count occurrences. They show you how often you saw a setup and followed your process. They never contribute to a figure for edge, and the journal tags the environment on every trade so they cannot slip in by accident.

The Weekly Review

Once a week, at a fixed time, away from the screen. Keep it short enough that you will keep doing it.

Look at the grades first, and ask whether the plans were any good. Then look at the execution marks and ask whether you finished them. Then look at where the two disagree, because that is where the specific problems are: the high grade with a failed mark, and the low grade you were rewarded for.

Ignore the weekly P&L. One week is a small sample, and it is dominated by which sessions happened to be on offer. Ignore any cohort with only a handful of trades in it, as well. It is a story, not a pattern.

Questions worth asking:

• Which checks failed most often on my lower grades?
• Where did I fail the mark, and was it the same place each time?
• Did I take trades with no trigger, or with the stop inside noise?
• What is the one thing I will do differently next week?

Pick one. A review that produces five changes produces none.

Using The Journal On This Site

The journal is built around the split described above. The form has two halves. The first half is the pre-entry plan: setup, location, trigger, stop, target, size and the grade. It is all filled in before the trade, and the grade field is labelled as the plan, not the outcome. The second half is the post-exit record, left blank while the trade is open: exit, R multiple, time in trade, and the execution mark.

To log a trade, fill in the plan, choose the grade from the four checks and save. When the trade closes, reopen it, complete the exit fields and set the mark. Everything is stored on your own device, and you can export it as one file for backup.

The analysis page is read-only. It reports live trades only, and counts sim and replay without pooling them. It shows results cut by setup, trigger and grade, discipline and sequence effects, stop survival, and how much of the available move you kept. Small samples are dimmed rather than hidden, and the page tells you whether you have enough of your own history for the figures to mean anything. Until you do, treat what it shows as a prompt for the weekly review, not as a verdict.