How do you track your trades?
by Deaddog 4 months ago
This year I'm doing something different to keep track of my trades.
I'll have to admit my previous method was lacking. I used stockcharts.com and added horizontal lines for the buys and sells and kept a separate chart list of my sells. When I reviewed the charts I had trouble remembering exactly why I had taken the trade or why I sold when I did. Did I follow my plan? I wasn't really sure.
New year and new method.
I'll take advantage of my Office 365 and Stockcharts.com subscriptions.
I'll keep the trading journal in One Note.
I'll have a separate section for each account and a separate page for each symbol.
When I enter a trade I'll use the snipping tool and grab a copy of the chart at the time I take the trade.
I can copy that to One Note and add comments as to why I took the trade.
I also have an excel spreadsheet for my plan that I enter my account size, entry price, stop and target price, along with the percentage of risk I willing to take. This gives me my position size and my R/R. I'll use the snipping tool to place a copy of the data for that particular symbol along with the chart.
When the trade is closed I'll also post a copy of the chart on that day. That way when I'm reviewing the trade I won't know or care what happened after I closed the trade.
With the chart showing the price action up until the entry, the plan posted and the final result shown on a separate chart, along with my comments, it should be fairly easy to see if I followed my plan. Or at least rationalize why I didn't.
I also keep a spreadsheet showing entry, exit, P&L, R/R. average win and loss size & percentage and cap gains or losses. A paper trail for the Tax man. (Being Canadain we have to convert $US gains and losses into $Can for tax purposes.)
I'm open to hear how others keep track of their trades.
I'll have to admit my previous method was lacking. I used stockcharts.com and added horizontal lines for the buys and sells and kept a separate chart list of my sells. When I reviewed the charts I had trouble remembering exactly why I had taken the trade or why I sold when I did. Did I follow my plan? I wasn't really sure.
New year and new method.
I'll take advantage of my Office 365 and Stockcharts.com subscriptions.
I'll keep the trading journal in One Note.
I'll have a separate section for each account and a separate page for each symbol.
When I enter a trade I'll use the snipping tool and grab a copy of the chart at the time I take the trade.
I can copy that to One Note and add comments as to why I took the trade.
I also have an excel spreadsheet for my plan that I enter my account size, entry price, stop and target price, along with the percentage of risk I willing to take. This gives me my position size and my R/R. I'll use the snipping tool to place a copy of the data for that particular symbol along with the chart.
When the trade is closed I'll also post a copy of the chart on that day. That way when I'm reviewing the trade I won't know or care what happened after I closed the trade.
With the chart showing the price action up until the entry, the plan posted and the final result shown on a separate chart, along with my comments, it should be fairly easy to see if I followed my plan. Or at least rationalize why I didn't.
I also keep a spreadsheet showing entry, exit, P&L, R/R. average win and loss size & percentage and cap gains or losses. A paper trail for the Tax man. (Being Canadain we have to convert $US gains and losses into $Can for tax purposes.)
I'm open to hear how others keep track of their trades.
T
TraderMike 4 months ago
You've created quite a system. I just use Edgewonk for my journaling
D
Deaddog 4 months ago
Took a quick look. Looks like you can customize the output to fit your needs.
How much time and effort is required to input your raw data?
I see you can import data from your broker but how does the program determine what set-up you used or whether you followed your plan.
How much time and effort is required to input your raw data?
I see you can import data from your broker but how does the program determine what set-up you used or whether you followed your plan.
T
TraderMike 4 months ago
The broker import is a huge help but it's not perfect. One problem, at least with the Interactive Brokers import (I assume it works the same for all supported brokerages but i'm not sure) is that it doesn't match buys and sells if they're not in the same imported file. So if you buy XYZ on Monday and then import all of Mondays trades... then sell XYZ on Wednesday, when you do the Wednesday import it will be listed as a stand-alone sale. If you waited until, say, Thursday to import all of Monday through Wednesday's trades then the XYZ buy and sell would properly appear as one trade.
So it's a little annoying to have to manually match up the closing trades in cases like that.
The set-ups have to be entered manually, along with your initial stop loss and target price levels. Those last two are used for the R-multiple calculations as well as some other metrics. There are fields for things like entry & exit notes, whether your original price target was hit and what they call "Trade Management"
So it's a little annoying to have to manually match up the closing trades in cases like that.
The set-ups have to be entered manually, along with your initial stop loss and target price levels. Those last two are used for the R-multiple calculations as well as some other metrics. There are fields for things like entry & exit notes, whether your original price target was hit and what they call "Trade Management"
The Trade Management graph analyzes the trade management approach and shows its effectiveness.
So it's certainly time consuming but the imports give you a bit of a head start. And I do like their analytics / reporting and being able to run queries / filter the data different ways.
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