Journaling Your Trades – An Essential Skill
If you want to take your trading from amateur to professional, journaling is essential and is one of the most effective tools for improving your performance. Simply put, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
No doubt though when you think of journaling you are picturing hours of tediously entering data – data that you may not even look at again, let alone know how to effectively analyse. So often, even if you do keep a trade journal you don’t see any improvements in your trading as a result of it.
Thanks to VEMA Trader, journaling will go from being something you dreaded doing to something that requires very little effort and provides you with a wealth of information and crucial feedback.
Due to VEMA Trader’s advanced tagging system (more on this in our next blog), when setting up a trade you only need to write a brief description of anything you want to add that won’t already be tagged. Think of ‘Notes’ as a space to record why you decided to enter the trade and any other information you consider useful.
The purpose of the ‘Notes’ field is so that when you go back and review the trade, you will remember what your thought process was at the time of setting it up. This can help you to see whether you missed something on the charts, or whether your analysis was right.
Your note becomes your first journal entry and VEMA Trader even saves a screenshot of your chart upon creation, eliminating yet another manual step to be carried out. As your trade progresses, you can add further entries to your journal in the ‘Comments’ section – notes on things like how the trade is playing out, if you missed something in your initial TA, or if new market structure forms.
Adding Notes is also important if you alter your open trade, as you will want to know why you did it when you go back and review your closed trade – e.g. if you move your SL, why? If you took profit early, why? If you move your target profit up, why? If you exited the trade manually, why?
Making use of the journaling function in VEMA Trader will not only provide you with detailed analysis on your trades, it will help you to start trading strategically and begin to shift your mentality from amateur to professional. Not bad for writing a sentence or two during your trade setup!
Stay tuned for future posts where we will outline how you can also capture mood and confidence levels, as well as add tags to your trades for future analysis.
By Sam Sillett
