Trading Journal can be used to keep track of your trades. Tracking, One of the most important things in every profession. Keeping track of data helps us to go back and analyse for the betterment. So as in Trading, Keeping Data of previous trades helps us to know how we are performing & how we can improve.
What is Trading Journal ?
You might have heard from the top Traders, that it is great idea to keep a Forex journal or a Stock journal and keep going through that every now and then. Trading Journal is nothing but the Data table, where you will save data such as, at what price you opened the trade, at what price you closed, how much volume and so on.
Though there are no. of brokers who allow you to download your Traded data in different formats, you will not have the luxury of modifying them however you want.
You can use any of the Spreadsheet applications out there such as Microsoft excel, Kingsoft, WPS.
1. Open Microsoft Excel and Create New blank Document
2. Click on any Cell for example B3, so that we leave two columns above and one row on left empty.
3. Start adding the Table Titles such as
Sl. No., Date, Time, Volume, Type and so on. Once added, use Merge and Center option to Merge two columns and align the text to center
4. To highlight these titles, Select all cells and go to Cell Styles and choose any default cell style and make the texts Bold.
As of now, we have only created titles for our Journal. Now, we have to add Pre-Data to respected columns in order to avoid adding them again and again while you make a new entry
5. Create a new Sheet and start adding all the symbols you trade one below the other
6. Select all, Right click and click on Define Name and type Symbols and click ok.
7. Go back to Sheet 1 and click on the column letter corresponding to symbol column and click on Data Tab and choose Data Validation, If you get a warning, choose NO. Now new window will open, under Allow drop down menu select List and in Source Box type =Symbols and click OK.
You can easily select Symbol from the drop down menu whenever you want to create new entry
same way, we can add Volume, Type, How it Closed and During NEWS too.
8. To add Data to volume, again go to sheet 2 and add the volumes which you usually trade one below the other like:
0.01, 0.05, 0.10, 1.0 and so on
Select all the volume cells and right click and select Define Name and type Volumes and click OK.
9. Go back to Sheet 1 and click on the column letter corresponding to Volume column and click on Data tab and choose Data Validation, If you get a warning, choose NO. Now new window will open, under Allow drop down menu select List and in Source box type =Volumes and click OK.
Same way you can add data to Type, How it closed and During NEWS.
| For Type | For How it Closed | For During NEWS |
| Buy | Stop Loss | Yes |
| Sell | Take Profit | No |
| Manual |
and after adding everything:
At this stage, you can save this Trading journal template and use it or you can keep customizing, the appearance, adding formulas to calculate pips & profits and so on. In this article, i have used Excel version 2013, options are same even if you are using the older version.
You can watch the video below to learn how to create Trading Journal and please do Subscribe to our YouTube Channel.
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