Trader's Diary - an indispensable assistant in trading in the market

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A trader's diary is a detailed illustrated report on all your trades and everything related to them. You can keep a diary the old-fashioned way - write with a pen in a notebook and paste charts there. But in the age of technical progress, of course, it is easier to keep a trader's diary electronically. It is much easier and saves time.

Why keep a trader's diary at all?

Human memory is undoubtedly a good thing, but even it has limits. We can very often forget something, even if we don't want to forget it. It is necessary to learn from your mistakes, otherwise they will be repeated over and over again. Thanks to the trader's diary, you will be able to solve problems with repetitive errors on the market and drastically reduce their number many times over.

For example, you often violate money management and like to enter a trade with 1/3 of your deposit. Before committing such a stupid thing, look in your trader's diary for the day where you already did it and see that you already did it in the past and lost money due to it, for example. The experience of past mistakes recorded in the trader's diary will stop you from making secondary mistakes.

If there are a lot of entries in the diary, it will take a long time to search. How to solve this problem?

Make it more convenient to work with the diary. You can make not just a table of contents, but a table of contents, for example, by errors: violation of money management - page 5, errors in opening positions at minimums and maximums - page 17, etc. In a word, It is necessary to at least systematize the information in some waywhich is in the trader's diary. Again, you do this only for your own convenience.

I'm too lazy to keep any kind of diary...

So you're too lazy to make money on . He who does not make money will bring it forever.

In fact, there is no specific plan for keeping a trader's diary. Every trader keeps it by himself, as he wants, or does not keep it at all. However, there are general recommendations which you can use when keeping your trader's diary. If you want, of course.

Recommendations for keeping a trader's diary

So, you should start by fixing the date of trade (day, month, year). Then, when opening a trade, the time of its opening, the currency pair on which the trade is opened and its volume are specified. Naturally, the time of closing of the transaction is also taken into account.

For more informative notes on opening and closing trades it is better to accompany with screenshots of charts with all other elements (indicators, etc.) that are part of your trading system. If you keep a diary the old-fashioned way (handwritten), then paste the charts in a notebook, or draw them by hand.

With any variant of keeping a trader's diary it is highly desirable to make a small description under the charts themselves at least in a couple of sentences, on what basis this or that trade was opened or closed. When describing the closing of a trade, you can mention its result, or simply summarize the trade at the end of the day.

Some traders may see a problem in filling out the trader's diary. Namely in the number of deals made per day. For some traders this number can be quite large. And if you describe each deal separately, it can be not only boring, but also the reason to give up keeping the diary. So, if you make a lot of deals in a day, just record the most significant of them.

That's the simple, uncomplicated way to keep a trader's diary. If you wish, you can add not only the charts on which you make a decision, but also any other elements that you see fit when filling out your personal trader's diary.

Whether to keep a trader's diary or not is your own business. But with it it will be easier to get rid of your repeating mistakes when trading on , you will get an invaluable assistant and you will thank your diary more than once.

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