From Chezz Larsson
I thought it would be important for me to help you stay organized when you trade. A lot of people don’t understand this, but it actually makes you a much more effective trader. When you can easily look through all your trades and understand it in a relatively short manner, you’re obviously going to be better off with your trading. This is why I think a trading journal will be very beneficial for you.

Personally, all I use is Microsoft Excel for this, but if you don’t have that you can just use OpenOffice‘s version of it (which is free). A lot of people get intimidated by spreadsheets and I was once like you. I remember having friends at university that used it and I could never figure out why. It just had a bunch of cells you could write in. It didn’t seem like anything user friendly or fun to maintain.

All you want to do is put all the important information in about the trades you make. Here is a list of what you should include:

• Time of placing trade and selling trade
• Attempted Strategy
• The Pair
• Entry and Exit
• Profit/Loss
• Comment – On the trade

This is really all you need for your trade journal. You just want to have the basic information about the trade there. This isn’t going to be a Bible of accurate and profitable trading, but it should help you learn and understand. Understanding is really the key and that is the value it will give you.