Trading Journal Prompts: 40 Questions That Become Data

Why most trading journal questions end up in a diary nobody rereads

A prompt like “how did you feel about today?” gets a paragraph. Paragraphs are honest, but you can’t sort them, add them up or compare March with April, so after a few weeks the journal turns into a diary and the habit dies. The fix is a format rule: every prompt below has a fixed set of answers. Most are yes or no, a number, or one tag from a short list you choose once and keep. One prompt in each group allows a sentence, because some lessons don’t fit a tag.

Keep the tag lists short (five to eight options each) and don’t change them mid-month, or last month’s answers stop being comparable with this month’s. Our guide to keeping a trading journal covers the basic fields every entry needs; these prompts sit on top of them.

Pre-market journal questions: before the session

Answer these before you open a chart. They take a few minutes and they catch the days you shouldn’t be trading at all.

• Hours of sleep last night? A number.
• Mental state, 1 to 5? One number, where 1 means distracted or upset and 5 means calm and clear.
• Anything outside trading on my mind today? Yes or no.
• Do I feel I need to make money today? Yes or no. A yes is pressure, and pressure is when rules get bent.
• What did yesterday’s journal say to repeat or avoid? One sentence, copied forward.
• Scheduled news inside my trading window? Yes or no, from an economic calendar.
• Which setups am I allowed to trade today? Tags from your playbook; anything not listed is off limits.
• Risk per trade today? A percentage, such as 1%, which the position size calculator turns into a size for each stop.
• Daily loss limit? A number in R or in money; when it’s hit, the session ends.
• Maximum number of trades today? A number.

Questions to ask at entry: during the session

Answer these when you place the trade, not afterwards, or hindsight fills them in for you.

• Setup name? One tag from the playbook. If it has no name, write “none”, which is an answer too.
• Is this setup on today’s list? Yes or no.
• Planned risk in R? Normally 1; anything else is worth a note.
• Planned target in R? A number, so you can later compare it with what you took. The R-multiple is the unit that makes trades of different sizes comparable.
• Confluences present? Tags, such as trend, level, session or volume.
• Emotion at entry? One tag, for example neutral, confident, fearful, impatient or frustrated.
• Trade number of the day? A number. Sorting by it later shows whether your fifth trade of the day does worse than your first.
• Was the last trade a loss? Yes or no. This is the prompt that catches revenge trades.
• Did I wait for the entry, or chase it? Waited or chased.
• Would I take this trade at full size if it were my only trade today? Yes or no.

Questions to ask after a trade closes

Answer these when the position is flat, ideally before the next trade.

• Result in R? A number, such as +2, −1 or −1.4.
• Did I follow the plan on entry, stop and exit? Yes or no. This is the most useful prompt in the list; the next section shows why.
• If not, which rule broke? One tag: early entry, moved stop, early exit, oversized, unplanned setup.
• Did I move the stop? Yes or no.
• Did I exit at the planned target or stop? Yes, or early, or late.
• Emotion at exit? One tag from the same list as at entry.
• Grade the decision, not the result, A to C? A good loss is still an A.
• Screenshot saved? Yes or no. A chart at entry and exit makes the weekly review faster than any note.
• Market condition? One tag: trending, ranging, news-driven or quiet.
• One lesson, if there is one? One sentence, or “none”.

Trading reflection questions: end of session and end of week

The first five close the day; the last five are the weekly review, and they only work because the thirty above gave you something to count.

• Session result in R, and trades taken? Two numbers.
• Did I stop at the loss limit or the trade limit? Yes, no, or not needed.
• How many trades broke a rule today? A number.
• Was today’s mental-state score honest in hindsight? Yes or no.
• What one thing goes into tomorrow’s first prompt? One sentence.
• This week: total R for trades that followed the plan, and for trades that didn’t? Two numbers.
• Which setup tag made the most R, and which lost the most? Two tags.
• Which broken rule appeared most often? One tag.
• Results by emotion at entry: which tag had the worst average R? One tag.
• One change for next week, and how will I count it? One sentence with a number in it.

How to turn journal answers into numbers

Here is why the plan prompt matters. Take a worked example: a trader logs 40 trades in a month, risking 1R each, with winners at the planned 2R when the plan was followed. Sorting by the answer to “did I follow the plan?” gives this:

The arithmetic: the 30 planned trades won 13 times at +2R and lost 17 times at −1R, so 26 − 17 = +9R, or 9 ÷ 30 = +0.30R a trade. The 10 rule breaks won 4.5R in total over three wins and lost 9.5R over seven losses (moved stops make losses bigger than 1R), so −5R, or −0.50R a trade. Without the tag, the month reads as +0.10R a trade, a thin expectancy. With it, the plan earned +9R and the breaks gave back more than half of it. The first thing to work on in that case is discipline, not a new strategy (though, as the next section shows, ten rule-break trades is a small sample), and the expectancy calculator will confirm the figures for your own tags.

The same sort works for every tag: setup, emotion at entry, trade number of the day, “was the last trade a loss?”. A spreadsheet pivot table does it in a minute, and our guide to win rate, profit factor and expectancy explains which of the three to look at for each tag.

How many trades before a tag tells you something

Small groups lie. A win rate measured over a handful of trades swings a long way by chance, so before you drop a setup or blame an emotion, check how many trades sit behind the tag. A common approximation for the 95% range around a win rate is 1.96 × √(0.5 × 0.5 ÷ n) at a 50% win rate, where n is the number of trades and the range is widest:

So in the example, the 43% win rate on 30 planned trades (13 ÷ 30) is consistent with anything from about 25% to 61%. One month says the plan is worth continuing; it doesn’t prove the plan has an edge. Keep the tags the same and let the counts grow, and treat a difference between two tags as real only when both have a few dozen trades behind them. Our guide to how many trades you need to backtest works through the same question for a whole strategy.

How to start without quitting by week two

Forty prompts on day one is how journals get abandoned. Build up instead:

1. Week one: answer only five prompts per trade: setup name, planned risk in R, result in R, “did I follow the plan?” and emotion at entry.
2. Week two: add the ten pre-market prompts and the five end-of-session prompts, because they cost a few minutes once a day rather than per trade.
3. Week three: add the rest of the entry and exit prompts, and drop any that you keep answering the same way.
4. From week four: run the five weekly prompts every weekend, and change one thing at a time so next week’s numbers can tell you whether it worked.

If live trades come too slowly to fill the tags, practice trades count as long as you label them. Bar-by-bar replay produces dozens of decisions in an afternoon: the replay demo steps through real Bitcoin 1-minute data in your browser with no sign-up. Secuora’s trading journal records emotions, rules followed, confluences and screenshots on each trade alongside the P&L and a calendar; it comes with Pro, which starts with a 3-day free trial (card required). A spreadsheet with the same columns works too, as long as the answers stay short and the tags stay fixed; our guide to a trading journal versus a spreadsheet weighs the two.

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