How to Journal Trades (Actually, A Short Guide)

Aurafy is a young, independent trading journal. It earns trust by keeping the local app usable without an account, making desktop data exportable, and being clear about which features are free and which require Pro.

At the time of the trade, 3 fields

(1) Setup tag: what pattern are you trading? Breakout, pullback, reversal, something else. Pick from a short list. (2) Emotion tag: how do you feel right now? Confident, FOMO, revenge, fearful. Be honest. (3) Stop price: where does this idea become wrong? If you can't answer this, don't take the trade. That's the whole journaling workflow at trade time. Takes 10 seconds.

End of session, 10 minutes

Open the journal. Scan the trades from the session. Write three things in the daily journal entry: What went right (one specific thing, not "I made money"). What went wrong (one specific thing, not "I lost money"). One observation (anything, "I kept staring at overnight levels even though I said I wouldn't"). Three lines. Done. Consistency matters more than depth.

Weekly, one pattern check

Once a week, open the stats page and look at per-tag expectancy. Which emotion tags are losing you the most R? Which setup has the best expectancy and the smallest sample? Pick one thing to change next week (typically: stop taking a specific setup, stop taking trades with a specific emotion tag, size up on your best setup). Change it. Track the change through the next week's tags. That's the feedback loop.

What not to do

Don't journal every trade with a paragraph of written notes if that makes you quit after two weeks. Don't backfill tags after you see the outcome, you're just narrative-fitting. Don't track 20 metrics if you only act on two. And be careful comparing yourself to social-media stats without knowing sample size, risk, drawdown, or whether losses are being shown honestly.

What to do after 100 trades

At 100 tagged trades, look at the data. Not every tag will have enough sample, but your top three emotion tags will. Almost every trader finds the same thing: one emotion (usually FOMO) accounts for disproportionate losses. Once you can see the number, "FOMO trades are -0.4R over 35 samples", the emotional decision to skip them becomes a rational one. That's the point of journaling.

Tools

Any journal that lets you tag trades in one click and review your stats works. Aurafy is free to start, log every trade, tag it, and see your core stats at no cost. Pro adds per-tag expectancy across your full history plus the deeper analytics. Open the web app here, nothing to install, just sign up and start journaling.