There are hundreds and thousands of trading books available. Each book has a different way to approach trading and find the best opportunities. All traders agree that a Trading Journal is essential to success.
Ask yourself now: Can you recall your last ten or twenty trades? What went wrong, and what should you have done? What did you do well? And what should you be doing more of? What mistakes are you repeating, and when? How much do they cost you? I could go on and on, but you probably get the idea.
No one can remember their past trades off the top of their heads. How can you become a more successful trader without knowing where and how to improve?
Trading is like running a small business. Businesses can only survive with the owner knowing the numbers. You can only run a business successfully if you know what you earn, your expenses, your profit, your best-selling products, or how much you owe in taxes. We can all agree that. It’s the same in trading.
Why do traders lose money?
Over 95% of traders fail. Few traders are successful. Why?
Without a trading diary and the ability to review their actions, traders will repeat the same mistakes. They may also need to make a better conclusion about why they fail.
When traders are focused on the wrong things, they will end up system-hopping (changing their trading systems constantly and searching for one perfect trading system that will make them money).
Many traders believe they are at fault for their trading timing and must improve it.
We have examined hundreds of trading journals, and the reality is very different. The reason traders are not profitable isn’t that they have an inefficient method of selecting trades, but rather several other factors:
Close winning trades too early.
Let losses out of control.
Micro-managing Trades
Trading without discipline
Get Emotional
Inconsistent risk management
What a good trading journal can do for you?
Trading journals could be more interesting and effective in tracking your trading. They also need the necessary tools. Excel spreadsheets, especially those created by the user themselves, are often discarded as useless data dumps.
Here are three important things to consider when creating a trading journal.
A trading journal makes you more accountable and helps you become more aware of what you are doing. Trading can sometimes be a lonely occupation. Once you begin keeping a trading diary, you’ll see that it acts as a mentor and accountability partner.
Trading journals are not one size fits all. Each trader is unique, has different needs, and thinks differently. A good trading journal is customizable.
Your trading journal’s feedback must be actionable. It may seem like a great idea to write down your thoughts or record how much you have won or lost on a random Excel sheet, but this will lead nowhere. It is only worthwhile to keep a trading journal if you can use it to tell you what changes to make and how.
Until now, professional trading analytics software was only available to large prop trading firms and bank traders. Edgewonk allows every trader to use a professional and customized trading journal for their trading.
Why EDGEWONK?
A trader shouldn’t waste time on spreadsheets that don’t provide any real help. You want to become a trader in the end, right? Businessmen don’t write their accounting software themselves; they focus on the real work. Start thinking like a pro and set clear goals and priorities.
We’re not developers, but we hired them to make our trading journals a more user-friendly experience. We wanted to fix the problems with trading journals once and for all and let other traders stop worrying about that area of trading.