Most trading journals die from too many columns, not too few. You read somewhere that journaling matters, so you build a spreadsheet with forty fields, fill it in religiously for three weeks, then stop opening it because reviewing it feels like doing your taxes. The problem was never discipline. The problem was that you tracked things you were never going to act on, and the useful fields drowned under the useless ones.

A journal is not an archive. It is a tool you point at your own behaviour to find the parts worth repeating and the parts worth killing. Every field you add either helps you answer a question you will actually ask, or it slows you down at entry and buries the signal at review. So the real skill is not tracking more. It is knowing which fields earn their place.

The one rule that decides everything

Track a field only if you can name the decision it will change. That is the whole filter. Before you add a column, finish this sentence: "I am recording this because when I review it, I will do more or less of ___." If you cannot finish the sentence, the field is decoration.

Under that rule, most journals split cleanly into two groups. There are fields that let you cut a losing habit or scale a winning one, and there are fields that just make you feel thorough. The second group is where good intentions go to rot.

What to always track

These are the load-bearing fields. Miss them and your review has nothing to stand on.

The trade skeleton

Instrument, direction, date and time. Obvious, but the time of day matters more than people expect. Sorting your results by session (London, New York, the overlap) often exposes a chunk of the account you did not know was leaking.

Entry, stop, and exit price. The stop is not optional. Without the planned stop you cannot measure risk, and without risk you cannot compare a trade you sized small against one you sized huge.

Position size and risk in money terms. How much you actually stood to lose, in currency, before the trade opened.

Outcome expressed in R

Record the result as a multiple of the risk you took, not just the pounds or dollars. A trade that made 300 on a 100 risk is a plus 3R trade whether your account is 2,000 or 200,000. R is what lets you compare Tuesday to Friday and last month to this one, because it strips out account size and position size. If you only ever log the cash figure, your journal quietly tells you that big-size winners are your best setups, which is a lie your position sizing told you.

A setup tag

Every trade needs one label describing why you took it. Trend pullback. Range fade. News reaction. Keep the list short and mutually exclusive, because the whole point is to group trades and see which group pays. This is the single field that most often reveals an edge, and it is worth doing properly rather than freehand. A consistent trade tagging system is what turns a pile of individual trades into an answer to the question "what actually makes me money."

MAE and MFE

Maximum adverse excursion is how far the trade went against you before it resolved. Maximum favourable excursion is how far it ran in your favour before you closed. These two numbers are quietly some of the most valuable things you can log, because they grade your stops and targets separately from your outcome. If your winners routinely dip only a few pips into drawdown before flying, your stops are too wide. If your trades regularly reach plus 2R and you keep closing at plus 0.8R, your exits are leaving the account on the table. There is more on reading these in the piece on MAE and MFE , but even a rough note beats nothing.

One line of reasoning, written before the exit

Not a paragraph. One line, written at entry, stating what you saw and what would prove you wrong. "Long on the retest of the range low, out if it closes below." Writing it before the outcome is the point. It freezes your actual thinking so that at review you can tell the difference between a good decision that lost and a bad decision that happened to win. Those two feel identical in your memory and could not be more different in your results.

A screenshot

One chart at entry, ideally marked with your levels. This is the fastest field to fill and one of the richest to review, because patterns your words miss are obvious to your eye three weeks later. You do not need a screenshot essay. You need the picture.

What to skip, or at least stop obsessing over

Here is where journals bloat. None of the following is evil. They are just fields that cost you at entry and rarely pay you back at review.

Ten-point emotion scales. Rating your "confidence" and "anxiety" and "greed" each from one to ten feels rigorous and tells you almost nothing, because the numbers are noise you invented on the spot. A single tag when something was genuinely off (tired, revenge, bored) is worth more than a mood dashboard you fill in on autopilot.

Indicator readings you will never sort by. Logging the RSI value, the MACD histogram, the exact EMA slope on every trade is data entry cosplaying as analysis. If you are not going to filter your results by "RSI above 70," the number is just friction. Track it only when you have a specific hypothesis to test.

A predicted grade for the trade. Grading a trade A, B or C before you know the outcome sounds disciplined and mostly trains hindsight bias. Grade the decision after the fact against your written plan, not the setup against your hopes.

Anything your broker already knows. Retyping fill prices, commissions and timestamps by hand is the fastest route to abandoning the whole habit. This is the boring data, and boring data is exactly what should be imported, not copied. TradeSave+ pulls fills, size and P and L straight in so the only fields left for you are the ones that need a human: the reasoning, the tag, the screenshot.

Vanity totals you cannot influence. A running count of total pips or total trades makes a nice number and changes no decision. Skip it.

How to know a field is earning its place

Run a simple test at your monthly review. Go through each column and ask whether you used it to make a call this month. Did the session field change when you trade? Did the setup tag change what you size up? Did MAE change your stop placement? Any field that has not influenced a single decision in a couple of months is either the wrong field or one you are not reviewing properly, and either way it should go. A shorter journal you actually read beats an exhaustive one you avoid.

This is also why the metric side deserves the same pruning as the fields. It is easy to stare at a wall of statistics that all move together and learn nothing. The short list of trading journal metrics that matter is smaller than most dashboards suggest, and expectancy, R distribution and your results grouped by tag will carry almost all the weight.

A note for forex and futures traders

If you trade around news or macro conditions, one extra context tag can be worth keeping: what the broad backdrop was when you entered. Risk-on or risk-off, a major release on the calendar, a central bank week. You are not trying to build a forecasting model in your journal. You are just tagging conditions so that months later you can ask whether your range strategy quietly falls apart on high-impact news days. Keep it to a single label, resist the urge to turn it into a research project, and let the pattern show up on its own.

The version that survives

The journal you keep for two years looks thin next to the one you abandon in a month. Trade skeleton, risk in R, one setup tag, MAE and MFE, a line of reasoning, a screenshot. That is enough to find your edge, grade your exits, and catch the habits that cost you. Everything past that has to fight for its spot, and most of it loses. Track light, review often, and let the fields you actually use tell you what to do more of.