My way of keeping track of Trades and Ideas

So it would seem the best way to track your progress trading would be your bottom line. Well this may be so, after all, you don't trade to be right, or to have an interesting topic of conversation..... you trade to make money! Well, if your bottom line is the purest way to track performance, what comes a close second? I would suggest that maybe it would be your methods of recording your trades, ideas and observations you make while trading. To that end, I've started another journal this go round.

In the past, I've used a notebook to record trades and ideas, I've also created a nifty little excel sheet to monitor P&L performance, commissions, trade frequency, time of day and all types of other things. Well this time I am going to use a combination of all of that. Maybe some might like this idea and spark creativity in their record keeping, maybe some will say it's just too involved? If you like it, use the idea for yourself.

So, this journal will consist of several elements. It will contain pictures of trades, these are just thumbnails of the picture that are all hyperlinks to the actual large picture within my journal folder. It will contain my P&L and various comments and observations I might have through out the day. I also write in my paper journal for quick access throughout the day. Later I transpose some or all of those thoughts into my electronic document. The finished product is actually rather involved IMO.

Some might ask "why not just record your day on Camstasia, or pay for a journaling program?" Maybe some might think it's just too much work? Well I've decided to do it this way for now for various reasons:

• It's definetely an organized way to keep track of things
• Unlikely to get lost and easy to back up
• It's easy to post pictures to it, with comments
• Easy to go back and edit later on
• Easily adaptable to add various statistics
• Even if I don't look at it again after posting to it, just creating the entry is a refresher on my thoughts on the day

Now the specifics on the journal. The table of contents consists of a hyperlink to each day. Each day is an entry. Each entry consists of four main sections:

1. General Comments on the Day
2. Trades that I ACTUALLY Took that Day
3. Trades That I Saw Occuring Real Time but Didn't Take and WHY
4. Trading in Hindsight, which consists of trades I didn't notice until after the entry was over

This Word Document is still in it's infantile stages as you will see. I have yet to add any Excell tables for statistics, or gotten the format exactly the way I want and I have yet to name it..... so for now it's just called, "Journal."

I don't plan on posting this journal online regularly or anything, I'm just sharing the initial project with you guys. Hopefully someone else likes it and gets some use out of something similiar.

I've converted the word document to a .pdf file for easier viewing just for this post. Below is the link for the .zip file containing the folder "journal." Just download from the link, then extract the entire folder somewhere. View the pdf, the hyperlinks should work as long as you leave the extracted folder as you found it.

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