What to Log in a Trading Journal (The Fields That Actually Change Anything)
Most trading journals record what happened and change nothing. The fields that actually improve your trading — R, MFE, MAE, skipped setups, rule adherence — and how to read them.
Most trading journals are diaries. Date, pair, win or loss, a sentence about how it felt. People keep them for months, learn nothing, and conclude journaling doesn't work.
The problem isn't discipline — it's that a diary can only tell you what happened, and you already knew what happened. A journal earns its time when it can answer questions you can't answer from memory: is my stop too tight, or is my entry early? Am I actually following my rules? Does the thing I skip half the time have an edge?
That takes about ten fields. Fewer than most templates, and different ones.
The test for whether a field belongs
Before adding a column, ask: what would I do differently depending on the answer?
"How I felt: anxious" fails that test — there's no decision attached. "MFE: 1.8R on a trade that closed at −1R" passes, because it points at a specific fix.
Most journal templates fail this badly. They're long because length feels rigorous, and every extra field you don't act on makes the log more expensive to keep and more likely to be abandoned. Ten fields you fill every time beat thirty you fill for a fortnight.
The fields
| Field | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Date + session | Segmenting by session is the most common real finding |
| Market | Edges are rarely uniform across instruments |
| Direction | Long/short skew shows up fast and is usually invisible |
| Setup name | Only if your rules define it — see below |
| Entry / stop / target | The trade as planned, before it resolved |
| Outcome in R | Survives position sizing; dollars don't |
| MFE (R) | How far it went your way — audits your target |
| MAE (R) | How far against — audits your stop |
| Mode | Replay / demo / live in one file |
| Rules followed? | Y/N. The single most valuable column |
| Taken / skipped / no-fill | The trades most people delete |
The bolded ones are the fields that separate a useful journal from a diary, and they're the ones almost nobody keeps.
R, not dollars
One R is the distance from your entry to your stop. A trade that hits its stop is −1R; one that makes twice its risk is +2R.
Record outcomes in R and everything downstream works: a trade you risked 0.5% on and one you risked 2% on become comparable rows, your results survive every change in account size, and your expectancy is computable. Record dollars and you get a number that describes your account balance at the time rather than your strategy.
Keep the dollar figure too if you like — it's motivating and occasionally useful for cost analysis — but R is the column you'll actually analyse.
MFE and MAE: the two fields that audit your exits
This is the pair that changes how people trade, and it's missing from nearly every template.
MFE — maximum favourable excursion — is the furthest a trade went in your favour, in R, before it closed. MAE — maximum adverse excursion — is the furthest it went against you before it resolved.
Why they matter: your outcome column tells you whether a trade won. These two tell you whether your exits were right, which is a different and more actionable question.
Read them like this:
- Losers with high MFE. A third of your losses went +1.5R before reversing? Your entry is fine and your target is wrong. You're giving back trades that paid.
- Winners with high MAE. Winners routinely dipping to −0.8R before working? You're one bad tick from stopping out of your best trades. The entry is late, not the stop tight.
- Losers with low MAE. Trades that go straight to your stop without ever paying you mean the entry is simply wrong — no exit tweak will save them.
- Winners with low MAE and low MFE. You're taking profit too early. The setup works and you're not letting it.
None of this is visible from win rate. You can have a 55% win rate and be leaving most of your money on the table, and the only evidence is in these two columns.
The mode column
One column marking each trade replay, demo or live, all in the same file.
Everyone keeps these separately, which guarantees you can never answer the only question that matters: does my live trading resemble the strategy I tested? Same file, one column, and you can compare directly — win rate, expectancy, average MAE, rule adherence — between the version of you that backtested and the version that trades.
The gap between those two rows is the real finding, and it's usually not the strategy. It's that live-you takes fewer setups, exits earlier, and follows the rules less often. That's not a strategy problem and no amount of re-optimising will fix it.
Rules followed: yes or no
One binary column, filled in before you know the outcome where possible, and never edited afterwards.
It's the most valuable field in the journal because it lets you build this table after a hundred trades:
| Followed rules | Broke rules | |
|---|---|---|
| Won | Good | Dangerous |
| Lost | Fine — this is the cost of doing business | Bad, but at least it's obvious |
Three of those squares are easy. The dangerous one is broke the rules and won — because that's the square that teaches you to break the rules. Every trader has a story about the time they moved their stop and it came back. Nobody counts how often it didn't.
If "broke rules / won" is happening more than occasionally, that's the finding. Not your entry model.
Log the trades you didn't take
The rows almost everyone deletes, and the ones that make the log honest.
Three kinds:
- Skipped — the setup appeared and you didn't take it. Record why: asleep, already in a position, hesitated, didn't like it, rules unclear.
- No-fill — you'd have entered but price never came to your level.
- Missed — you were away and found it afterwards.
Why bother? Because your strategy's real performance includes them. A backtest where you catch every setup is testing someone who doesn't exist, and the gap between what your rules generated and what you actually took is usually the single biggest difference between your test and your account.
The reason field is where the value is. If "rules unclear" appears eleven times, your rules aren't finished — that's a specific, fixable problem that no amount of reviewing winners would have revealed. If "didn't like it" appears constantly, you have discretion operating outside your written rules, and it's worth finding out whether it's an edge or noise: score those setups 1–5 before the outcome, then check after a hundred whether the score correlates with anything. It'll be one of three answers — your discretion is an edge worth formalising, it's noise worth deleting, or it's inverted and you should do the opposite.
Setup names, and the discipline they need
A setup name is only useful if it's defined by your rules rather than by your impression. "A-grade setup" is not a setup name — it's a memory of how you felt.
If you can't state what makes something an A rather than a B before the trade resolves, don't record grades. Record the mechanical descriptor instead: which level was swept, which session, which timeframe pairing. Those segment cleanly later; grades don't.
What to do with it after 100 trades
The log is worthless until you read it, and reading it means four passes:
- Expectancy overall. Average R per trade across every trade, wins and losses. This is the headline number, not win rate — 45% at 2.5R (+0.575R) beats 60% at 1.4R (+0.44R).
- Segment it. By session, by direction, by market, by month. The most common real finding in trading is that an edge lives in one session and is diluted by the others.
- Read MFE and MAE against the four patterns above, and adjust exits before you touch entries. Exits are cheaper to fix and people always start with entries.
- Compare modes. Replay versus live. If they diverge, the strategy isn't the problem.
Then change one thing, and log the next hundred against the new version. Changing three things at once means you'll never know which one worked, and you'll have blended two strategies into one sample — the most common way a backtest quietly becomes meaningless.
Where the sample comes from
The catch with all of this is that a hundred live trades takes months. That's the argument for building the journal in replay first: you can put a few hundred honestly-logged setups through bar-by-bar replay in a couple of weeks, with the same fields and the same discipline, and arrive at live trading already knowing your expectancy, your MFE pattern and your real rule-adherence rate.
If the testing procedure itself is what's loose rather than the record-keeping, start with how to backtest a trading strategy — this page is its logging stage, in full.
Which is exactly what CRTLAB is for — replay any of 38 markets candle by candle with a journal and trade analytics built in, free, no card. The fields above are the ones it records, because they're the ones worth recording.
FAQ
What should I record in a trading journal? Date and session, market, direction, entry, stop and target, outcome in R, MFE and MAE in R, whether it was replay/demo/live, whether you followed your rules, and whether the trade was taken, skipped or a no-fill. About ten fields. The test for adding any field is whether you'd do something differently depending on the answer — most templates fail that test, which is why they get abandoned.
Why log outcomes in R instead of dollars? One R is your entry-to-stop distance, so recording in R makes trades comparable regardless of position size and keeps your results valid when your account changes. Dollars describe your balance at the time, not your strategy. Keep dollars as a secondary column if you want, but analyse in R.
What are MFE and MAE, and why do they matter? Maximum favourable and maximum adverse excursion — the furthest a trade went in your favour and against you before it closed, measured in R. They audit your exits rather than scoring your outcomes. Losers with high MFE mean your target is wrong, not your entry. Winners with high MAE mean your entry is late, not your stop tight. Neither is visible from win rate.
Should I journal backtested trades or only live ones? Both, in the same file, with a column marking which. Keeping them separate makes it impossible to answer whether your live trading resembles what you tested — and that comparison is usually more informative than anything inside either set on its own.
How many trades before a journal tells me anything? Around 100 before patterns are worth acting on, and 300+ before you'd make a big change on the strength of one. Below about 40, a strategy with no edge produces good-looking results often enough to mislead you — the sample size math covers how often.
Do I need a trading journal app, or is a spreadsheet fine? A spreadsheet is completely fine and many good traders never use anything else. What matters is that the fields are right and that you fill them every time. The advantage of a journal attached to the chart is only that it removes the friction of switching windows, which matters more than it sounds when you're logging a few hundred replay trades.
What's the single most useful column? Rules followed, yes or no. It's the one that surfaces the square nobody looks at — broke the rules and won — which is the pattern that quietly trains traders to abandon their process. Every other column measures the strategy; this one measures whether you actually traded it.
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