Keeping a Trade Journal is Hard, But it's Worth it

Ever since I started trading, I've been keeping track of my trades.

Although I have no idea what I'm doing, I have a list of what stocks I bought and sold.

I remember that my first trade was BDO simply because that's where I deposited the money for opening my COL account and because Henry Sy owns it and there are a lot of BDO branches.

I think I bought it at 88.00 and then sold it after only a day at 87.00. 

I didn't like it.

And on my first trade, I already knew that these blue chips suck.

Seriously.

My first basura trade was MARC on April 25, 2014 (just about a week after opening my account). News came out that it was suspended.

Bought it at 3.77, sold it at 3.90.

I was clueless.

Just looking at the bid/ask and waiting for comments on a thread.

My first profit in the stock market was based on pure damn luck.

And so I went on like that.

Just recording the ticker symbol, what price I bought when, and what price I sold when.

Then I realized that I need more than buy and sell prices.

So I added new columns like what indicator I used, what set-up it was, and others.

I tried to fill every cell for every trade every day.

It was tiring.

And over time, you'd certainly lose interest doing it especially if you are smacked with losing streaks.

"Does this really matter? This doesn't change anything. Just writing prices, dates, indicators. I'm still losing. I might as well stop this. I'm wasting my time."

But I kept going.

I had a firm belief that someday, doing this would pay off.

I kept going.

As I did, the things I recorded changed as I went on.

Some columns were deemed useless and got deleted.

While some were given more attention.

It took more than a year before the things I wrote started to make sense.

I caught a glimpse of a bigger picture.

I thought I was writing about stocks.

I was wrong.

I was writing about myself.

The image above is what my trading journal looked like on the last quarter of 2015.

This is my performance for the last 97 trades I did in 2015:

Turned out, for the second half (almost) of 2015, the chances of breaking even on my trades is higher than winning them, while losing 55% of the time. Aside from that, I am only able to follow 1 out of 3 trading plans that I formulate.

The question is, WHY?

I'd get to that later. For now, here's what my current trading journal looks like:

And here's my performance, so far:

Out of 39 trades, my win rate almost doubled and I barely breakeven although my fail rate increased by 5%. I have followed the plan 60% of the time which is twice as successful since last year.

The next post is the best part of keeping a trading journal.

"Self-discovery"