Your trading journal and weekly review

⚠️ Risk warning: CFDs and leveraged forex are complex instruments with a high risk of losing money rapidly. Most retail accounts lose money. This content is education only, not investment advice or a recommendation.

A trading journal is the record that turns trades into lessons. Without one, you remember the big wins and the painful losses and forget the rest. With one, you can see which setups you actually follow, which rules you break, and what that costs.

What to record for every trade

Before the trade: market, timeframe, setup name, the reason in one sentence, entry, stop, target and size.
After the trade: exit price, result in R and in money, and a screenshot of the chart at entry and at exit.
Behaviour: did you follow the plan (yes or no)? If not, which rule did you break? How did you feel before entering?

The weekly review

Sort the trades into "followed the plan" and "broke the plan", and total the R for each group.
Look for repeats: the same broken rule, the same time of day, the same market.
Pick one thing to change for next week, and write it at the top of the next page. One change at a time is easier to check.
Judge decisions, not outcomes. A trade that followed the plan and lost is a good trade. A trade that broke the plan and won is still a mistake.

Worked example: Saudi Aramco (2222), daily, in riyals. The figure uses drawn prices. The setup is a pullback after a breakout. The pullback low is 25.50; the trade enters at 25.80 with a stop at 25.40, a risk of 0.40. It exits at 26.40, a reward of 0.60, which is 0.60 ÷ 0.40 = +1.5R. The journal entry also notes that the entry was taken before the daily candle closed, which the plan does not allow. The result was a win, but the review marks it as a rule broken, because the same habit will also produce losses.

Common mistakes

Recording only the results and not the reasons, so the review has nothing to learn from.
Skipping the journal after losses, exactly when it is most useful.
Changing many things at once after a bad week.

This lesson is educational. A journal improves your process; it does not make any future trade more likely to win.

🛠️ Practice task

Use a real chart. This is for practice, not for placing a trade.

Create a journal sheet with columns: date, market, timeframe, setup, entry, stop, target, size, exit, result in R, followed the plan, rule broken, feeling.
Take your last ten demo or backtest trades and fill in every column. Add a screenshot for each.
Total the R for trades that followed the plan and for trades that broke it.
Find the rule you broke most often. Write one sentence on what triggered it.
Write one change for next week at the top of a new page, and check it in the next review.

🎯 Mark this chart

Study the drawing, pick the letter, then check. This exercise does not count toward your progress; the quiz below does.

Gold H4: find the entry that broke the plan Illustrative chart: drawn data, not real prices.