How to Build a Trade Log

A trade log in five lines

A trade log is a sheet with one row per trade and the same columns for every row. The fixed columns are the facts: date, symbol, direction, size, the price in, the price out, the pips, the money. The computed columns are the arithmetic the sheet does for you: the running total, the average pips per trade so far, the worst dip so far. The written column is one sentence, why the trade was taken, in the words of the rule. The test of a log is that a stranger could rebuild your account from the sheet alone; if they could not, a column is missing. Every paper on this shelf, the equity curve, the drawdown, the wobble, the Monte Carlo, is read off a log like this and nothing else.

A ship's log

Picture a ship's log, the book in which every watch gets a line in the same order, date, course, speed, wind, remarks, whether the sea was flat or the mast came down. It is not a diary of the interesting days; it is every day, in the same columns, and its value is exactly that a court or an owner can rebuild the voyage from it. A trade log is the same book. The calm week and the week that lost 30 pips in a day get identical rows, and the rows that would be embarrassing to write are the ones the book is kept for.

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