Those of you who have attended any of our LIVE Inner Circle education sessions, or participated in our courses, will know that a regular theme covered is the importance and benefits of measuring your trading. One of the key tools we often discuss is the use of a trading journal.

For those of you less familiar with this as a concept, a trading journal is a method through which you record your decisions and actions on all trades you enter for a specific period (often a month at least). This allows you not only to see the dollar performance of individual trades but more importantly to make judgements on:
a. How well (or otherwise) you are following your trading plan;
b. How well (or otherwise) your plan as a whole, and its specific components are serving your trading results.

Subsequently, you are then able to amend as necessary either your behaviour, your plan components, or indeed both with “hard” evidence.
Many would suggest that this is a crucial system in any trader’s development.

One of the common questions we are asked relates to the set up and contents of such a journal. Quite simply, your aim should be to measure all aspects of the trade set up, entry and ultimately exit decisions. Such information could be recorded on a spreadsheet, a word document or even in a notepad for example.

To help you kickstart your journaling process, the download attached to this article gives an example of the detailed information you could choose to collect.

It is easily adaptable to any trading vehicle should you be trading Forex, index CFDs or Share CFDs.

Simply click below for access to your pdf download.

trading journal blueprint

If you would like to know more about how we can help your trading learning journey, why not join our Facebook “Inner Circle” group for weekly educational content,  or there is also our “Next Steps: course (see image link on the right) where you can access a full video course including a specific session on journaling and an example template to download.

One last thing…find the concept of “Blueprints” useful? If so drop an email to mike.smith@gomarkets.com and let us know and we can develop some more.

Trade Safe

You can find additional forex education resources here. For information on other trading tools, see our Autochartist, Genesis for MetaTrader, and VPS for MetaTrader information pages.