Keeping a diary will help you monitor your own progress and be aware of your mistakes in order to avoid them in the future. Most traders quickly abandon this practice.

A diary should brief all your trades and their related aspects

• What market conditions were at the entry?
• What was the market sentiment at that time?
• How did you close it?
• What feelings did you have during its evolution?
• Did you follow your plan?

In this way, in the long run, you’ll be able to identify:

• those situations when your strategy works the best;
• which indicators and graphical formations proved to be more useful;
• how to distinguish the real breakouts;
• your higher predictability conditions;
• the session during which you have the highest profitability;
• mistakes such as setting SL and TP too high or too low;
• the factors that push you away from your plan;
• if the position-sizing was in line with your Money Management system.

To ease your review take screenshots for each trade. In this way, you’ll easily remember entry premises and have a clear picture of market conditions at that time.
You may check your trading history also on the platform as well, but you’ll see there only levels set. Screenshots are the safest option when there occurs a platform error and help you discover and prove the eventual fraudulent practices of your broker.

Each trader can customize his log depending on how he wants to use its information afterwards.
We recommend you keep a record of your daily, weekly and monthly earnings so you could make yourself a statistic on your own performance and predictability rate. The data that matter in this respect are:

• Profitability percentage - the number of profitable trades divided the total number of trades;
• Non-profitability percentage - the number of non-profitable trades divided the total number of trades;
• The most profitable trade and the greatest loss - for the accuracy of statistic, don't considere them for the rest of the formulas;
• Average earnings - total amount of earnings divided the total number of profitable trades;
• Average loss - total loss divided the number of non-profitable trades;
• Average earnings per trade - Average earnings divided Average loss;
• Average transaction time - the total transaction time divided the total transaction period;
• Opportunity conditions - market conditions and order types in which you had the highest return;
• The longest losing streak;
• Average winning streak - reflects your maximum risk potential;
• Expectations - (Profitability percentage * Average Earnings) - (Non-Profitability percentage * Average Loss) = how much you can expect to win/lose;
• Emotions and mistakes - this evidence cannot be evaluated in numbers. It assumes a self-analysis of your work discipline, your stress level, the reasons why you keep intervening, whether the interventions were opportune or not. It allows better understanding and more accurate anticipation of those moments when you would like to act in some way based on your graphs, but your instinct says you the opposite.

Sometimes our own habits are unknown to ourselves until they are reviewed in perspective.