Keeping A Trading Journal Is Hard But It’s Worth It

Keeping a trading journal is hard.

But so is losing all your trading capital, failing as a forex trader, giving up, never to return to forex trading ever again.

And reminiscing about the good ‘ol simpler days of being happy when there were only five TV channels to choose from.

Which would you rather choose?

Entering trades in a journal forces you to view the trades in black and white, rather than simply relying on your memory, which for most humans, is a stretch.

More importantly, a trading journal allows a trader to step back and view their trades as a group of trades, and not as individual and ultimately random transactions.

Boy, this sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it?

Heck ya, it is, but doesn’t anything worth achieving require work?!?

Keeping a trading journal is the equivalent of an athlete’s practice.

It’s not uncommon for a professional athlete to spend far more time practicing or training for an event than actually participating in it.

According to Tim Grover, Michael Jordan’s personal physical trainer:

“Michael would go for 40 or 50 points one night, and the next morning he was right back at it in practice. He just couldn’t take a day off. His mental toughness was unbelievable, but the reason was that he was so physically ready every day. He used to have a saying, ‘I practice so hard because that makes the games easy for me.’”

John Wooden, winner of a record 10 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championships, and known as one the greatest minds basketball has ever known, ran a very strict and disciplined two-hour practice, 5 days a week, in preparation for a 40-minute basketball game.

Do you know who much time that is? That’s 10 hours (or 600 minutes) of practice for 40 minutes of the real thing.

And that’s not all! Not only did he stress meticulous and deliberate practice, but he also kept a LOG of how every practice went.

Coach Wooden would refer to his practice logs if his team had a problem he couldn’t solve.

For example, if his current team was shooting poorly, he would research his old practice logs to determine how they could improve their shooting.

Even in the days of no computers or iPads, Coach Wooden understood the importance of strict record keeping!

While the act of journaling really isn’t that hard, it is a time-intensive process that will require consistent effort.