What to log on every trade, and what to stop logging

There are two ways a journal dies. The first is that it records too little to be useful, so reviewing it teaches nothing. The second, far more common, is that it records so much that filling it in becomes a chore you skip on busy days. Busy days are the ones worth recording.

The test for any field is simple, and most fields fail it: would a different value here have changed a decision you make later? If not, it is data collection for its own sake.

The fields that earn their place

Captured for you

Symbol, direction, size, entry and exit prices, timestamps, fees, and every partial fill. None of this should be typed by hand in 2026. It comes from a sync or an import, and hand-entering it is both slower and less accurate. If you are typing fill prices, fix that before you tune anything else.

The four that actually need you

1. The setup. Which named pattern this was. Without it you cannot ever answer "which of my setups makes money", which is the highest-value question a journal can answer.
2. The planned stop and target, recorded at entry. This is what makes R meaningful and what lets you tell a plan that failed from a plan you abandoned. Recorded after the fact it is worthless, because you already know how it ended.
3. One line on why you took it. Written before or during, not after. It is the only field that captures what you knew at the time rather than what you know now.
4. Mistakes and rule breaks, tagged honestly. The single most valuable column in the whole journal, and the one most often left blank on exactly the trades it matters for.

What to stop logging

• A screenshot on every trade. Enormously popular, rarely re-read. Take them for trades that surprised you and skip the rest.
• Free-text market commentary. It feels productive and is nearly impossible to analyse; you cannot group by a paragraph. Convert the recurring observations into tags, which you can count.
• Post-hoc emotion ratings. Scoring your confidence after seeing the outcome measures hindsight, not psychology. Either capture it at entry or leave it out.
• Fields you have never once filtered on. Look at your last three reviews: any field you did not sort, group or filter by is a field to delete.

The rule of thumb

Log what the market did automatically, and what you were thinking manually. The first is a data problem and should never touch your keyboard. The second is the entire reason the journal exists, and no import will ever do it for you.