Trading Journal

What is the Trading Journal

The Trading Journal is a system where you can keep track of your trades and positions.

If you are familiar with the old Trade Registry, it is a more flexible system where you can have many portfolios and accounts under each Journal instead of just one portfolio as before.

You can also write comments for trades and positions in case there is something you wish to remember.

You can also enter Targets and Stop Loss to see how you perform.

There is also a system with Tags where you can tag each position with 3 different types of tags where you can note Reason for taking the trade, Any errors committed, and a third Label tag where you can put in what you want to help organizing the trades.

Positions and trades in a Journal are listed like this:

Here ABB is the Position. When clicking the + button, all the trades for that position will be listed.

At the bottom of the page you can see a summary of the most important performance statistics:

Note that in some cases these cannot be calculated if important information is not available for some trades. For example if Historic Exchange Rate is unknown (NAN = Not a Number), then many of these statistics will show N/A.

How do you begin with a Trading Journal

The normal way to start (or expand an existing) Trading Journal would be from the Trading Window:

Here you can start a new journal or add the current account and portfolio from the Trading window to an existing journal.

Selecting an existing journal will show the Journal Setup window with the Account and Portfolio added from the current Trading window.

The checkbox next to the portfolio will enable or disable automatic capture of trades for that portfolio. If you have opted for automatic capture, any trades you make for that account and portfolio will show up in the Journal. Note that the trade will show up in any Journal configured to capture trades for the account and journal in question.

In the Journal Setup window you can also rename the journal to something more descriptive if you want:

Only the Journal can be renamed, not the Account or Portfolio.

You can invoke the Journal Setup dialog manually at any time by selecting the following icon in the Journal window:

In the Journal window you also have some options where you for example can start a new blank journal. Or switch the view to another journal.

Note in the menu above that there is a menu option called Manage Journals. Selecting this will allow you to manage all the journals you currently have created in a window similar to this:

Journal related charts

You can chose between 4 different charts. The last 3 only work for Closed Positions.

• Journal Trades

This chart will display your trades overlayed the position you have currently selected.

The blue dots are Buys and the red dots are Sell.

• Histogram

This chart will divide a selected metric into separate ‘buckets’ where you can see the performance. More buckets will automatically show if you expand the window. Here Trade Duration (in days):

• Bar Chart

Like the Histogram, Bar Chart will divide the graph into different ‘buckets’ where you can see the performance of a different set of metrics than the Histogram. Here Day of week:

• Line Chart

The Line chart will show the Running Sum of Realized Gain/Loss over time.

Commenting on Trades and Positions

Double click on a trade or position in the Journal window to bring up the following window:

Here you can enter your Target and your Stop Loss and have it continuously calculated.

Add Tags to remind yourself why you chose to buy an instrument and any mistakes you might have made. Use the Label Tag to organize your trades. You need to press Enter after editing a tag.

What you enter here is also show in the journal columns if they have been selected to be visible:

And you can also filter on these columns. For example the Setup Tag:

There is a column called Reviewed in the Journal:

The purpose of this is to help you keep track of whether you have made all annotations you wanted or not for the trade/position. Then you can readily see the status in the list instead of having to open the Edit Position dialog. The position checkmark will only show if all trades for the position has been reviewed. Toggle it by clicking the checkbox. This checkbox can only be accessed in the Journal window Reviewed column.

To change what columns to display, right click the column header and select Select Columns…:

It will bring up the following dialog where you can select what columns to display: