How to Journal Trades: A Daily Routine That Takes Minutes

To journal trades, record each trade in three short passes: a plan before the session, a few key fields as you take each trade, and the result in R with one lesson after the session. Keep it short enough that you do it every day; a journal you fill in for a week and abandon tells you nothing.

CME Group's own trade-plan course puts it simply: if you win a trade you want to know exactly why, and you want to know the same when you lose. Here is a routine built for that, with a worked futures example.

Why most trading journals get abandoned

The usual story: a spreadsheet with 40 columns, filled in carefully for three days, then skipped "just today", then forgotten. The problem isn't discipline. It's that the journal costs more effort than it seems to give back.

The fix is to split the work. Capture only what you can't reconstruct later (your reason and your state of mind) at the moment of the trade, and leave the analysis for a fixed weekly slot. If you want the full list of fields worth tracking, our trading journal template has 18; this article is about the habit that fills them in.

Before the session: two minutes

Write these down before your first trade:

1. Your limits for today. Maximum loss for the day, maximum trades, and if you trade a prop account, your distance to the daily loss limit and the drawdown floor.
2. Risk per trade in dollars and in contracts for your usual stop.
3. What you're looking for. One or two setups, not a list of everything that could happen.
4. Scheduled events. Economic releases inside your session, with the time.
5. A one-word state check: rested, tired, rushed, frustrated.

This is the part people skip, and it's the part that makes the rest meaningful. You can only grade "did I follow my plan" if there was a plan.

During the session: about 20 seconds per trade

Right after you enter (or right after you exit, if entering is too busy), capture:

• Instrument, direction, size: MNQ, long, 3 contracts.
• Entry, stop and target in points.
• Setup name, using the same names every time so you can filter later.
• One-line reason: "pullback to VWAP after opening drive".
• A grade for the decision, not the outcome: A if it matched your plan, B if it mostly did, C if it didn't.

Grading the decision separately from the result is the most useful habit in this whole routine. A C-grade trade that made money is still a C, and it's the trade most likely to cost you next week.

After the session: five minutes

1. Add exits and P&L, or import them from your platform's CSV so the numbers are exact.
2. Convert each result to R: profit or loss ÷ the dollar risk you planned. This makes trades of different sizes comparable. R-multiple explained covers the details.
3. Save one screenshot per trade, marked with entry, stop and exit.
4. Tag anything unusual: news, moved stop, oversized, revenge, late entry.
5. Write one lesson in one sentence. Not five. One.

CME's course suggests the same idea: write down your daily conclusions so you can refer to them later.

Keep tags to a short, fixed list so they can be compared later. How to tag trades gives a four-group system with a worked 60-trade example.

A worked example: one MNQ session

Plan: risk $120 per trade, which is 3 MNQ with a 20-point stop (20 × $2 × 3 = $120). Daily stop: −$240, or two full losses. MNQ is worth $2 per point; our futures tick values chart has the rest.

The day finished at −$120, or −1R, before fees. Without trade 3 it would have been +$60. Trade 3 was taken straight after a loss, with no setup and double the size; it's a textbook case of what our guide on revenge trading describes.

The lesson for the day writes itself: "After a loss, next trade at normal size only, and only on a planned setup." That one sentence is worth more than the P&L, because it's the thing you can change.

Notice what the grades do. The two A trades made +$60 together, a win and a full loss. The C trade alone cost $180. Over a month, the gap between your A trades and your C trades is often the clearest number in your whole journal.

Once a week: 30 minutes

Daily entries are the raw material. The weekly review is where they pay off. Look at:

• total R, and R by setup,
• A-grade vs C-grade results,
• trades tagged "revenge" or "moved stop" and what they cost,
• your best and worst session times.

Then pick one rule to follow next week. Our step-by-step weekly trading review walks through it in 30 minutes.

Spreadsheet, notebook or app?

Any of them works if you use it every day. The trade-offs:

• Paper notebook: fastest to start, impossible to filter or total.
• Spreadsheet: flexible and free, but you maintain the formulas, the point values and the imports yourself.
• Journal app: imports, R and statistics are done for you; the risk is spending more time on the dashboard than on the entries.

Whatever you choose, keep it separate from any one broker or prop firm, so your history survives if you change firms. We explain why in what happens if your prop firm shuts down.

Five rules that keep the habit alive

1. Log the same day. Memory rewrites losing trades within hours.
2. Log no-trade days too. "Didn't trade, no setup" is a good entry and keeps the streak going.
3. Use the same setup names and tags every time, or your filters are useless.
4. Grade the decision, not the outcome.
5. One lesson per day, one rule per week.

TJ is built around this routine: Log It! captures a trade in about 20 seconds, Rate It! grades your setup against your own checklist, imports bring in exact fills from your platform's CSV, and a journal streak (with a "No trade today" option) makes the daily habit visible. Start free or try the demo.

Futures trading is risky; CFTC's own guide to futures market basics warns that many individuals lose all of their money. TJ is journaling software, not financial advice.