Adrian ReidFounder of Enlightened Stock Trading

What Is The Best Trading Journal System?

6 May 2022 · 1 min

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1:28

Adrian Reid explains his personal systems for recording trades and keeping a trading journal. For trade logging he uses an Excel spreadsheet with columns such as system, date, ticker, entry date, entry price, commission paid, exit date, exit price, and personal notes to enable evaluations. For daily journaling (ideas, psychology, rule-following) he uses Microsoft OneNote because it is available across phone, computer and iPad, is searchable, and supports freeform notes; he considers many dedicated journaling apps overkill.

Questions this video answers

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft OneNote

Columns include system, date, ticker, entry date, entry price, commission paid, exit date, exit price, commission paid (exit commission), and personal notes

Chapters

I just use Excel. So when I'm using, if I'm talking about a trade log. So to record my trades, literally, I have Excel spreadsheet with columns for a column, for what system it is, for the date, for the ticker, for the entry date, entry price, commission paid, exit date, exit price, commission paid, and any personal notes. And then that's enough to generate all of the kind of. To do all the evaluations. If you're talking about journaling, as in how well did I do today? What trading ideas did I come up with? What worked, what didn't work? How's my psychology? Am I following my rules consistently? Trade journaling. I use OneNote. And the reason I use Microsoft OneNote is because it's on my phone, it's on my computer, it's on my iPad. No matter where I am, I can access my journal and I can write notes, I can write thoughts and ideas. So I use it to capture all of my trading system ideas, all of my. The indicators and things that I want to test and play with my thoughts, my emotions and all of that. I capture it all in OneNote. I've got it everywhere. I've never got an excuse to not write something down. And it's all searchable, so I just use that. I don't promote any specific sort of journaling software or whatever. I think a lot of them are quite overkill. I prefer the flexibility and freeform, but that works for me.