10 Things You Must Include in Your Trading Journal

What should you actually record in a trading journal?

Ten things, and every one exists to change a decision you make later. A journal isn't a diary. It's a record that lets you open a closed trade and see whether the process held up, not just whether the trade made money. Fill in the ten fields, add the funded-account columns, and review the lot weekly. Here is the proof.

Five fields are recorded once and revisited monthly. Five go in on every trade. Get the split right and an entry takes about five minutes; skip it and you'll track so much you stop filling it in.

What a trading journal is for

A journal answers one question you can't answer from memory. Did I trade my plan, and did my plan work? Those are two separate questions, and a profit number answers neither. You can follow your plan and lose, or break your plan and win, and both teach you something only if the entry recorded what you actually did.

That's why the ten fields pair an outcome with the decision that produced it. A win rate on its own says nothing about whether the wins came from your edge or from a rule you broke and got away with. If the trading itself needs work, the risk management for funded traders guide covers the rules side; the journal is how you find the rules you keep breaking.

The ten things every entry needs

1. Your trading goals

Write down why the account exists. A monthly income target, a number of payouts a year, a skill you're trying to prove. Record it once and read it back monthly. A goal gives every later entry a standard to measure against. Without one, a green week and a red week feel the same.

2. Your market outlook

Before a session, write one or two sentences on where you think price is heading and why. That's a written bet on your own read. Score it honestly after the session. Over a month you'll see whether your read or your execution is the weaker half, and those two problems need different fixes.

3. Your research notes

Note the news, events and levels that shaped your view. A central bank decision, a weekly range, a level that keeps rejecting. When a trade works, the note shows which part of your research fed the decision. When it fails, it shows whether the research was thin or the execution was.

4. Mistakes and missed opportunities

Keep a running list, updated the moment each one happens. Moved my stop. Skipped a setup because I was on the wrong chart. Sized up after two losses. Log the setups you saw and didn't take, too. They show whether your filters are too tight or your follow-through is the problem.

5. Performance stats

Win rate, average win, average loss and profit factor, worked out weekly rather than per trade. A single trade is noise. Twenty trades carrying the same mistake is a pattern, and the stats make it visible. Keep them in the same file.

6. The setup zone

Mark the price area you were watching and why it mattered. A prior high, a broken trendline, a clean daily level. A screenshot helps. This shows whether you enter at the areas your strategy was built around, or force entries elsewhere and call it the same setup.

7. Your entry trigger

The specific event that made you click. A candle close above a level, a rejection wick, a break and retest. "It looked good" isn't a trigger, and if the field can't be filled with something specific, that's the answer: there was no trigger. Impulse entries are the ones you can't describe.

8. Position size and risk

Lots or contracts, the percentage of the account, and the dollar risk, written before entry. This field decides whether a losing streak is survivable. The how much of your account to risk per trade breakdown gives the sizing method; the journal is where you check you used it.

9. Your management rules

Stop level, target level, whether you'll take partials, and what would make you exit early, all set before the trade opens. A written plan is the only thing you can compare your in-trade behaviour against. When you move a stop, the entry shows you planned one level and took another. The target and stop are two halves of the same reward to risk ratio, and the scaling out piece covers why partial exits go wrong.

10. The post-trade review

After the trade closes, answer three questions. Did I follow my rules? Why did this trade win or lose? What would I do differently? Keep each answer to a line. This is the field most traders skip, and it's the one that turns a record into a lesson.

The columns a funded trader needs and a retail trader does not

Retail traders track the trade. Funded traders track the trade against a limit that can end the account. Three extra columns belong in every entry once you're on a firm's capital.

Run the numbers on a $60,000 2-Step account. The daily loss limit is 4%, which is $2,400, and the maximum loss is 8%, which is $4,800. Update both columns after every trade and the arithmetic does the warning for you. Down $1,000 by lunchtime means $1,400 of daily room left, not a reason to make it back. Down $3,000 on the week means two thirds of the maximum loss is gone, and the next position should be smaller.

The prop firm drawdown limits explainer covers how those limits work across the programs. Rapid runs a 3% daily and 4% maximum loss, Instant runs 3% daily and 6% maximum, and the 2-Step runs 4% daily and 8% maximum. The columns don't change. Only the numbers at the top of them do.

Every SFX program runs on the same rulebook, and we pay rewards on demand with an average payout time under eight hours. The 2-Step Challenge starts at $39 for a $7,500 account, with an 8% then 5% target, a 4% daily and 8% maximum loss, no time limit, and account sizes from $7,500 to $180,000.

Three entries from one account

Here's what the same ten fields look like across three trades on a $60,000 2-Step account. One decision held to the plan, one broke it, and one went the right way on a losing trade.

Entry one. Setup: a daily level that had rejected twice. Trigger: a candle close back below the level. Risk: 0.5% of the account, $300, with the stop 20 pips above. Management: stop fixed, target at 1:2, no partials before 1:1. Outcome: target hit. Rules followed: yes, every field matched the plan. Loss limit remaining after: $4,800. This entry reads the same whether the trade wins or loses.

Entry two. Setup: none written. Trigger: none written, entered right after a loss on the previous position. Risk: 1.5% of the account, $900, twice the usual size. Management: stop moved twice. Outcome: full loss. Rules followed: no. Loss limit remaining after: $3,900. Distance to the daily limit: $600 left for the day. Every field there is a warning: the entry with no planned setup was the entry that broke the plan. That pattern doesn't show up in a profit column on its own.

Entry three. Setup: trend continuation after a pullback. Trigger: a bullish close on the pullback. Risk: 0.5%, $300. Management: stop fixed, target fixed. Outcome: stopped out for a loss, then price ran to the original target without me. Rules followed: yes. This is the entry that stops traders quitting a working process. The loss came from a valid plan, the journal says the process held, and the fix is nothing. Without the entry you'd only see the red number and change something that works.

Read the three together and the argument is visible in the account itself. Entry one and entry three are the same approach with different outcomes. Entry two is a different trader.

How to review a journal weekly without it becoming a chore

The review is where the journal pays, and where most journals die. Keep it short, fixed and mechanical so it never competes with screen time.

Pick one slot a week, outside market hours, and put a 30-minute timer on it. Sort the week's entries by rules followed, yes or no, and read the no column first. Those are the trades that cost you, and there are usually fewer of them than the winners you'd rather look at.

Then ask four questions of the whole week. Which setup made the most money, and is it the one I spent the most time on? Which rule broke most often, and in what condition did I break it? Did the risks I listed match the sizes I took? What single number would move if I fixed the biggest leak?

Update the performance stats while the trades are fresh, not from memory a month later. Wherever a mistake repeats across two weeks, promote it into the pre-trade checklist as a gate. That's the loop closing: the review changes the process that caused the problem.

If it keeps getting skipped, shrink it rather than drop it. Ten minutes on the no column beats thirty you never find.

How the journal feeds your pre-trade checklist

The checklist is what you run before you click, and the journal is where the checklist comes from. It isn't a list of good intentions. It's a list of the mistakes you've already made, written as questions you answer before the next trade.

The journal records what happened. The weekly review finds the mistake that repeats. The checklist turns that mistake into a gate. Moved a stop on entry two? The checklist gets a line: where is the stop, and has it been set before entry? Sized up after a loss? The checklist gets a line: is this the plan size for this setup, or a reaction to the last trade?

Keep the checklist to the few questions your own entries justify. One built from your last month of losses will be sharper than one copied from a book. Run the checklist, take the trade, score it in the journal, review at the weekend, update the checklist. That's one loop, and the account gets a little harder to tilt each time round. In funded forex it's the difference between a good week and a failed account.