Creating a Trading Journal - Who's Keeping You Grounded!

Yesterday just before our weekly voice meeting Dada sent us this article that discusses the need for a Trading Journal and How to create one.

With our voice meetings going deep into the night, I didn't end up reading up last night. But it was the first thing I read this morning as I sipped into my cup of latte. I was immediately impressed and decided to make mine by today. I took some time out in the evening and got started on it. I have just recently started trading so it didn't take me too long to retrospectively add in all my trades from Binance (mostly) and Bittrex.

According to the article, there are two parts to make the journal. One is the actual trades...the numbers and logic, the spreadsheet with facts. That is what you see above. The blue are the trades I have exited already. The green shows trades where I've made profit. Hopefully we don't see too many reds in the coming days ;)

The other part is the emotional part...or an extra notes at the end. This is where I should document exactly what I'm thinking when entering a trade....when exiting a trade...everything that's going on in my head. But as I said, I have added all these trades retrospectively, so that moment is gone now. Maybe I'll jut them down when I exit the existing trades. Maybe I'll just document them on my blog so that I can receive constructive criticism about my state of mind ;)

To start things off, I'll just document some of my thoughts I have right now regarding the trades. Let's take the TWT/USDT trade first. TWT is the native token of the Trust Wallet, one of the most widely used mobile app...at least I've seen almost all my friends use it to store their cryptocurrency assets. It also allows staking TWT for FRONT tokens. Although I don't plan on staking, I see this going up in value as it provides an utility purpose....staking one coin to get another coin seems to be the hype these days ;) The chart below does show a steadily growing interest.

NOTE TO SELF : Will look to add my position on this depending on available funds.

Looking at mt targets on some of the other trades, the exit points seem a bit too far fetched. I know. But as dada says, the crypto market is highly news driven and these trades, especially FET and COS are getting quite the marketing on twitter. I'm just hoping to ride the free marketing :D

Now that doesn't mean I'm making the decision based on nothing. I have closely followed the coins of my previous trades even after I exited the trade. Same scenario for those, I rode the free marketing. But I didn't trust the hype entirely and exited the trades too early, always.

So this is one lesson I need to keep in mind, DON'T EXIT A TRADE TOO EARLY.

One final lesson I'd like to document today is actually something I was just telling Sakib this morning. One of the trades we entered had a pullback. But I've seen over the past couple of weeks, that having patience is essential.

This trade pulled back twice after I entered. Had I panicked and did a stop-loss, I'd have missed out on the rally a few days later. Another reason why you don't see stop losses on my journal yet. I am entering every trade with amounts I can afford to lose and recover in other trades....unless everything goes south and I'm taking 80% losses on all my trades. Let's not hope for that day :)

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta