Since journaling has been a hot topic on the sub recently, I wanted to share an example of how I maintain my own journal.
Everyone says journalling is boring and you can't do it consistently, takes a lot of discipline to maintain etc. I agree, journaling is a complete drag and easily the worst part of my day. All the manual work feels pointless and I tried to avoid it at all costs.
However, the journal itself is a goldmine for analysis, understanding why your winners win, and why your losers lost, when do you win/lose, characteristics of winning trades vs losing trades, etc adds incredible insight that would take much longer to acquire if you're just relying on muscle memory. You're much better off with one than without imo.
So eventually I decided to automate everything and just make my inputs purely point-and-click. This project started out as a tool I use personally, and ended up as a *free* community tool for everyone.
I got the tool to automatically propagate into every trading day:
\- Market regime (uptrend / pullback / mixed tap / strong trend, etc)
\- Overall market health
\- T2108 reading (for TC2000 users)
\- My entries/exits/pnl etc extracted from my broker csv
\- Comparison of my equity curve vs SPY buy-and-hold
It asks for basic information from my (my mood, my emotional state, setup grading A/B/C/D, etc all as click-only tags). It auto fills the journal entry for me and it takes less than 10 seconds.
Since then, I've never missed journalling a day. I published a two year sample trading journal as an example: [https://edgestacker.com/two-years-trading-journal/](https://edgestacker.com/two-years-trading-journal/)
Hope this helps, if you need any help or you have any ideas on how to make it better just lmk. Happy trading!
