What should a prop trader record in a trading journal?

Tags in the Terminal report make the setup column fast: tag each trade once and filter by tag in the weekly review. Keep the list of tags short, five to eight at most, or the filter stops telling you anything.

• Daily result versus the daily limit. Note your worst day each week as a share of the 5% limit (or 3% on Instant Funded). If your worst day is creeping toward it, size is too large.
• Best-day share. Best day ÷ total profit × 100. On funded accounts it must stay at or below 35%. With $2,000 of total profit, your best day may be at most $700.
• Distance to the maximum-loss floor, in dollars, at the end of each week.

Write these three numbers every Friday. They take two minutes and turn the rules from surprises into numbers you watch, the same way you watch price.

Once a week, read the journal in one sitting and answer three questions:

1. Which setup produced most of the R, and which lost it?
2. Which bent rule cost the most?
3. What is one change for next week?

One change, not five. Write it at the top of next week’s page and check it in your pre-market routine. Look at MAE and MFE as well. If your winners often go far against you before they work, your entries may be early. If your losers rarely move in your favour at all, your setup may need a filter. Let the data suggest the change, then test it for a few weeks before you judge it.

Over a few months the journal becomes your own rulebook, built from your own trades.

Use the same fields for winners and losers. Notes on losses only hide what your good trades had in common, and a winner you executed badly deserves a line too.

What should you record in a trading journal for every trade?

Record the setup, the reason, entry, stop, take profit, risk in dollars and the result in R, plus one line on whether you followed your plan. A chart snapshot before and after makes the review honest.

Memory keeps the big winners and the painful losses and drops the rest. A journal keeps all of them. After twenty or thirty trades it shows what your setups actually do, which markets suit you, and where you break your own rules.

Journal the trades you skip as well. A setup you passed on because it failed your checklist is part of the record: if skipped setups keep working, your checklist may be too strict; if they keep failing, it is doing its job.

A journal also slows you down in a useful way. If you have to write a reason before each entry, impulsive trades become harder to take, because “it looked like it was going up” is an uncomfortable sentence to write.

• Date and time, in UTC to match the Calendar tab.
• Symbol and direction, for example EURUSD buy.
• Setup name, such as “pullback to support in a 4h uptrend”.
• Reason, in one sentence, written before the entry.
• Entry, stop and take profit prices.
• Risk in dollars and as a percentage, for example $50 at 0.5%.
• Planned ratio, for example 1:2.
• Result in dollars and in R.
• Plan followed? Yes or no, and what changed.
• One lesson, in a single line.

Take a Chart snapshot when you plan the trade and another when it closes. The two pictures show what you saw and what happened, without your memory editing either.

The History tab in the Positions / Orders / History panel holds the fills, so you can copy the entry, exit and result. Order value & limits shows the commission. The account panel shows today’s P/L and the trade count, which you can note at the end of each day next to how much of your daily loss limit you used.

R is the result divided by the amount you risked. A trade that risked $50 and made $100 is +2R. A full stop is −1R. A trade closed early for $20 is +0.4R.

R makes trades comparable across markets and sizes. A week of +2R, −1R, −1R, +1.5R and −1R totals +0.5R. That tells you more than a dollar total, because it does not change when your account or risk changes. It also shows quickly when losses are bigger than −1R, which almost always means a stop was moved or skipped.

1. Sort the week’s trades by setup name.
2. Add up R per setup. Which ones paid, and which only cost?
3. Count the trades where you did not follow your plan, and their total R.
4. Check your days against your limits: on a $10,000 1-Step Challenge account the daily loss limit is $500. Did any day come close?
5. Choose one change for next week, and only one.

Do the review on a day you are not trading, so the numbers guide the next week instead of the last trade.