Forex

1. What's your thoughts on keeping a trades journal ? should one do it, how important is it as one develops as a trader ?

and 2. What software do you use, or would you recommend for doing this ? i'm thinking it should be able to do mp3 voice recordings and attach images to entries, screenshots of the charts when entering the position.

any thoughts on thsi ? thanks in advance Smile

Hello can anyone say me?

This expectancy stuff is very intriguing. I plan to take advantage of that concept immediately. I have been keeping a log of every trade I have done, but I have not kept track of what I now wish I had (overall market sentiment, etc…). Do you have a specific list of recommended things to keep in a trading log, or better yet, do you know of any trading log software?

I’ll answer the last part of that question first. I couldn’t find any (reasonably priced) software after doing some searches on Google and in the EliteTrader forums. I did find one site/service, TraderBrain, which looked very interesting but apparently the service is shut down. I actually started out using a generic journaling software package but after a week or so I realized that a spreadsheet would be a much better way to go. One problem with using a package like that is that I could only see the details of one trade at a time. The other big issue was that it didn’t allow be to generate statistics.

A spreadsheet solves both of those problems. And after seeing the example spreadsheets in Van K. Tharp’s ‘Financial Freedom Through Electronic Day Trading‘ it became very clear that a spreadsheet was the way to go. The journal that Tharp recommends calculates the (oh-so-important) expectancy of your system. It also displays your win %, which is a number that I’m always interested to see. Tharp also discusses other ideas for things a trader may want to write down, from things like market sentiment and indicator values to things like room temperature and what was one your mind at the time.