FaceTheTrading Journal
What to write in a trading journal (and why most traders quit theirs)
Almost every trader starts a journal. Most stop within a few weeks. The problem usually isn’t discipline — it’s that the journal asks for the wrong things, at the wrong time.
Search for a trading journal template and you’ll find spreadsheets with thirty columns: ticker, entry, exit, size, R-multiple, setup, timeframe, market condition, screenshot, notes, lessons, mood on a scale of one to ten. Fill that out after every trade and you’ll have a beautiful record for about two weeks.
Then a fast morning happens. You take six trades, lose on four, and the last thing you want to do at the close is relive each one in a spreadsheet. You skip a day. Then a week. The journal quietly dies, and with it the only honest record of how you actually trade.
A journal you don’t keep can’t change anything.
Why most trading journals fail
There are three common reasons, and none of them is that the trader didn’t care.
They cost too much. Every extra field is friction. On the days you most need to journal — the bad ones — you have the least energy left to do it.
They’re written too late. An entry written hours after the trade isn’t a record; it’s a reconstruction. By then you’ve already explained the trade to yourself in a way you can live with. The frustration, the rushed click, the “just this once” — those fade first.
They track results, not decisions. P&L, win rate and R-multiples tell you what happened. They almost never tell you why you took the trade you knew you shouldn’t have. And the why is the only part you can actually change.
What’s actually worth recording
If you strip a trading journal down to the parts that change behavior, you’re left with a short list. For each trade:
1. The setup, and whether it met your rules. Name the setup you believed you were taking, then answer one question honestly: did it meet every rule in your plan? Yes or no. “Mostly” is a no.
2. Why you entered, in one sentence. Not a paragraph. One sentence, ideally said or written before the order goes in. “Pullback to VWAP with volume confirming” and “I didn’t want to miss it again” are very different trades, even if the chart looks the same.
3. How you felt right before the click. Calm, rushed, frustrated, bored, trying to win back the last loss. You don’t need a mood scale. You need the word you’d actually use if a friend asked.
4. What you did with your stop and size. Did you move the stop? Add to a loser? Size up after a win? Most rule-breaking shows up here first, so it’s worth one line.
5. A process grade. Grade the trade on whether you followed your plan — not on whether it made money. A rule-breaking winner is a bad trade that happened to pay. A by-the-book loser is a good trade. If you only ever grade on P&L, the journal will teach you that breaking rules works, because sometimes it does.
That’s it. Price data, screenshots and statistics are useful context, and your broker already keeps most of them. The five items above are the ones nobody else can record for you, and the ones that disappear fastest.
What you can skip
Long “lessons learned” essays tend to repeat the same three lessons in different words. Detailed market commentary is easier to get from the chart later. And numeric mood ratings rarely mean much on review — a 6 on Tuesday and a 6 on Friday aren’t the same thing. If a field doesn’t change what you’ll do on the next trade, it’s a candidate to cut.
Capture it while it’s happening
The most valuable parts of that list — why you entered and how you felt — are also the parts that fade fastest. The fix is timing: record them during the trade, not after it. Even saying your reason out loud before you click is more honest than anything you’ll write that evening, because you haven’t had time to edit it yet.
That’s the idea behind a trading journal you talk into. FaceTheTrade records video and audio for the length of each trade, asks you short questions out loud — why are you entering, how are you feeling, why are you exiting — and transcribes your answers. Afterwards you review the actual moment instead of a reconstruction, and grade the trade A/B/C on process. There’s nothing to type, which is most of the reason people keep it up.
A journal you’ll still be keeping in a month
Whatever tool you use, the test is simple: will you still be filling it in after a bad day, three weeks from now? Keep it short. Capture the decision while it’s happening. Grade the process, not the outcome. A five-line journal you keep beats a thirty-column one you abandoned — and if you keep breaking the same rule, it’s the one that will show you when and why.