Hello all,
I've been a lurker here for quite some time and have been closely following certain threads that pertain to my style of trading (reversals/breakouts). I've gathered that there are quite a lot of us who trade for a living on this forum, many of them with years of experience.
I've also found a diverse range of trading strategies being discussed here, but what I haven't seen so far is a discussion pertaining to trading journals. Sure, there are quite a lot of threads with the ubiquitous "Excel sheet" formulae to maintain records, but I'm wondering has anyone ever felt the need for something better. I myself have a tab delimited plain text file of my trades with the following
Date, time
Instrument
Volume
Entry price
SL
TG1 / TG2 / xTrailing
SL:TG ratio (risk:reward)
Risk (Rs.)
Risk% = (Risk/Equity)*100
ATR (10, M5) value
ATR (10, H1) value
Exit Price
Exit Time
Max Drawdown
Max Drawdown%
Reason for exit (esp., if exit != TGs)
Profit/Loss (Rs.)
Post-trade description of move
but have recently felt the need for something more. Something that will show me my equity curve, profit after brokerage/taxes/cess, something that will make it easier to file my IT returns every year, make it easy for me to attach a chart screenshot of each trade. Have any ideas? Any readymade software to do this? Any brokers offering such a recordkeeping feature in their custom trading terminals?
This is important because a journal is the best source of learning for any trader and a lack in this area could be quite detrimental to one's account equity, no?
Regards,
Dhaval.
I've been a lurker here for quite some time and have been closely following certain threads that pertain to my style of trading (reversals/breakouts). I've gathered that there are quite a lot of us who trade for a living on this forum, many of them with years of experience.
I've also found a diverse range of trading strategies being discussed here, but what I haven't seen so far is a discussion pertaining to trading journals. Sure, there are quite a lot of threads with the ubiquitous "Excel sheet" formulae to maintain records, but I'm wondering has anyone ever felt the need for something better. I myself have a tab delimited plain text file of my trades with the following
Date, time
Instrument
Volume
Entry price
SL
TG1 / TG2 / xTrailing
SL:TG ratio (risk:reward)
Risk (Rs.)
Risk% = (Risk/Equity)*100
ATR (10, M5) value
ATR (10, H1) value
Exit Price
Exit Time
Max Drawdown
Max Drawdown%
Reason for exit (esp., if exit != TGs)
Profit/Loss (Rs.)
Post-trade description of move
but have recently felt the need for something more. Something that will show me my equity curve, profit after brokerage/taxes/cess, something that will make it easier to file my IT returns every year, make it easy for me to attach a chart screenshot of each trade. Have any ideas? Any readymade software to do this? Any brokers offering such a recordkeeping feature in their custom trading terminals?
This is important because a journal is the best source of learning for any trader and a lack in this area could be quite detrimental to one's account equity, no?
Regards,
Dhaval.
