Journal and emotions
Recording why you took a trade, while you still remember it.
2 min read
A result tells you what happened. Journal and Emotions are where you record why — and the window for that is much shorter than anyone expects.
Two lines written at the close beat an hour of reconstruction at month end. The second one is fiction, and you will know it while you are writing it.
What each one holds
- Journal — a written entry per trading day, filed under that date and sitting on a board beside the days you have not written up yet — so the reasoning is still there the next time the same setup is. A single trade carries its own note, tags and setup chart, on the trade itself.
- Emotions — logged against a trade rather than against the day. You pick what you were feeling from a fixed set and split a hundred points across them, and the breakdown then reads every one back against the result — so the states that cost you money show up in the record instead of in hindsight.
Tags are yours to define and are managed in Settings. A tag you use every day beats a taxonomy you abandon in a fortnight.
A habit that survives a bad week
- Write at the close, not at the open — before you know the outcome you are writing a prediction; after it you are writing evidence.
- Answer one question — "was this the setup I said I trade?" A yes or no is worth more than a paragraph of narration.
- Tag it and stop — the entry you actually finish is the one that is still there in a month.
The payoff arrives about a month in, when you can narrow the Trades table to one way of trading and see what it really pays. Today that narrowing is the Strategy facet — there is no tag facet in the Filters popover yet, so a tag is something you read on a row and search for by text. Tagging now is what gives that filter something to work with when it lands.
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