Glossary
Trading journal
A trading journal is a structured record of every trade you take — entry, exit, size, and result — plus the context behind it: the chart, your reasoning, and your emotional state. Traders use journals to review performance objectively, find repeatable edges, and eliminate recurring mistakes that raw broker statements never reveal.
A broker statement tells you what happened; a journal tells you why. The difference is the context captured at the moment of the trade — the setup you saw, the plan you had, and the state of mind you were in when you clicked. That context is exactly what memory distorts within days.
Journals can be manual (a notebook or spreadsheet) or software-based. Software journals automate the tedious part by importing trades directly from platforms like MT4 and MT5, then add analytics — win rate, expectancy, drawdown — that would take hours to compute by hand.
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