How to keep a forex trading journal.
One of the most important aspects of learning how to trade more successfully is learning how to keep a forex trading journal. As anyone in this industry will tell you, it's very easy to let the trading experience to get away from you and become predictable. This is why keeping track of your progress can be so important. Here are some simple tips that will help you achieve this goal and much more.
First and foremost, write down everything that happens during each trading session. It doesn't matter if it's small or large. Keeping a trading journal will keep you on task, calm and ready to make decisions about your trading strategy the next time around. If you have a trading platform, all you need to do is take note of every transaction that transacts on your platform. You can also keep track of such things as chat conversations and news regarding the market.
When beginning to learn how to trade more successfully, it's important to take stock of your decisions. Don't dwell too long on whether or not a particular move was right or wrong. That's always a weighing process that you'll have to come to terms with sooner or later. Instead, focus on noting whether or not a decision was profitable for you or not. This will help you stay motivated to continue with your forex trading education and will keep you on the right track toward becoming an expert in this field.
You also need to be careful not to make decisions based purely on emotion. Remember that forex is merely a means of exchange. No matter how you make money or how badly you lose, the decisions you make will ultimately have an effect on your bottom line. Therefore, staying level-headed is always the best policy.
Keep your trading journal by either saving it as an online document or printing it off the paper. This is probably the best way to go because then you can just toss the paper in the trash when you're done writing. Of course, there's nothing wrong with having both types of documentation. In fact, if you prefer to carry a notebook along with you, that would also be a good idea. Either way, your decisions made during the course of the day will give you a great insight into what to do the next day and which strategies seem to work best.
Keeping a forex trading journal will also help you prevent losing streaks because you'll be able to easily identify them. You can't let emotions get the better of you when trading forex. If you let yourself fall prey to bad decisions, you'll end up quitting before you see any real profit. Even if you're only making small stakes, it's still important to remain level-headed and use logic when making decisions.
Another thing to remember is to keep your trading journal for your own personal growth. Sometimes we make decisions based on emotion instead of solid logic. By recording your decisions made during the course of the day you can start to learn how your brain works and see if you can use it to improve your trading skills. This will help you make decisions that are more logical and will result in better returns.
If you aren't recording your decisions made during the course of the day, then you're likely making guesses as to where the market will go next. While this may seem like a smart thing to do on some days, other days you'll end up making poor decisions based on pure emotion. That's why it's important to always keep track of your forex trading journal. You can look back on it later and analyze which decisions were made well and which were not. This will help you become a better trader overall and increase your chances of making better decisions in the future.