If you’ve been in the trading industry for a while, you’ve probably heard that journaling trades is part of every successful trader’s daily routine. There is absolutely no doubt that this activity has a highly positive effect on your trading performance. But what if you started keeping a public trading journal? Could it lead to even better trading results? Let’s find out!
What Is A Public Trading Journal?
A public trading journal is a record of executed trades and the circumstances that led to them, shared with the general public or trading community. It may take the form of a blog, forum thread, or a dedicated X (Twitter) or Instagram account.
Unlike a private, non-public trading journal, it allows you to get feedback on your trades, make new friendships, or create a public track record. As you’ll see below, there are many benefits to this kind of journaling.
1. Comparing Your Results With Others
When you start recording your trades publicly, you are helping to create a unique database that can be used to compare different or the same strategies. For example, if you trade an ICT Market Maker Model strategy on US indices, you will probably want to compare your results with someone using the same trading model in the same markets.
However, for such a comparison to be possible, the community must consist of many disciplined and like-minded traders willing to share their data and insights. Thus, if you want to take advantage of this benefit provided by public trading journals, join us and start carefully journaling your trades today!
2. Finding Hidden Mistakes
Do you ever ask yourself why this setup worked, and another one didn’t? They both look the same, right? So why did one fail and the other end up winning? These are questions that all traders ask themselves from time to time, and sometimes, they are not easy to answer.
Fortunately, the right community can help with solving problems like these. As the saying goes, four eyes can see more than two. Maybe you’re just making a mistake you can’t see. Let us check it out!
3. Mastering Emotions
We all experience emotional ups and downs. Whether we like it or not, our mood is often influenced by our recent trading results.
For example, if we are doing well, i.e., making money and passing trading challenges, we are confident, full of positive thoughts, and feel like winners. However, as soon as our equity curve starts to move downwards, we get into a losing streak or lose our account, and we start to feel miserable.
Do you think you’re the only one experiencing this? No way!
Just record your emotional state in your public trading journal and let more experienced traders help you. You might be surprised how many trading coaches you will find.
4. Strategy Improvement
If you keep your trading journal in such a way that your readers can fully understand your strategy, you may receive suggestions for improvements that you might not normally think of.
For example, someone might encourage you to trade Smart Money Reversals (SMRs) only in certain periods, as the data suggests this increases the success rate of a given setup. Would you think of that?
Maybe you would, and maybe you wouldn’t. However, thanks to the community, you can be sure that a stream of similar suggestions will always flow to you.
5. Confidence Boost
It’s a really satisfying feeling when you see that trading your strategy is delivering the desired results. However, despite your success, you may still have doubts about whether you are doing everything right. After all, you want to be sure that the results achieved are not the work of mere coincidence or luck, don’t you?
What you need is reassurance from the community that what you are doing is right!
Basically, what you are looking for is for someone to go through your trades and confirm their validity.
Are you asking how to do that? Well, as long as you keep your trading diary carefully and attractively, you will never have a problem finding comments under your posts.
So make sure that your trades are well described and documented. If you then get positive feedback from the majority, you can be pretty sure that you are on the right track. This will not only affect your future trading but also your confidence!
6. Perfecting The Risk Management
Are you one of those traders who are always unsure where to place the stop-loss and profit target? Not sure what percentage of your capital you should use in your next trade? Or perhaps you want to see if your risk management strategy can be improved.
Traders discuss these topics all the time!
Through your trading journal, let others know what problem you are currently solving and help your readers understand your personality. Remember that risk management is a very individual issue, so to get the right suggestions and solutions, members of our community need to understand you.
Are you rather risk tolerant or risk averse? Do you prefer a high or low risk-reward ratio? Do you use one, two, three, or even more profit targets? If you want help fine-tuning your risk management, these are a few questions you’ll need to answer in your trading journal.
7. Sticking To The Trading Plan
Having trouble sticking to your trading plan? Or maybe you don’t even have one? That’s okay.
Start keeping a public trading journal, write down the rules of your trading strategy, and let the community monitor whether you’re following them. Then, whenever you deviate from your trading plan, there’s a good chance that others will notice and want to ask you a lot of good questions.
Simple and effective. However, this member control system can only work if you keep your public trading journal conscientiously. So, be disciplined!
8. Recording Your Evolution
If your goal is to gain respect in the trading community, there is no better way than to chronicle your evolution through a public trading journal.
Not only will you record your journey from complete beginner to expert trader, but you will also provide bulletproof evidence of your ability to generate a long-term positive equity curve.
What’s more. Your story can inspire other community members to stay disciplined and determined to achieve their goals because hard work and hours spent on journaling pay off.
So, is there another trading rock star out there?
9. Getting Attention
Perhaps you are one of those people who enjoy the attention of others and interacting with them. If you keep your public trading journal in an attractive and organized manner, you will surely never have a lack of feedback.
Especially if you prove that you are a great trader, don’t be surprised if you become one of the top 10 most-read contributors on our forum.
People just love success stories.
And if you want a really large audience, don’t forget to add a link to your journal on your forum, Discord, Instagram, or X (Twitter) profile.
10. Making New Friends
By showing other community members what you do and how you do it, you are likely to gain a number of supporters who may later become your friends.
Maybe you’ll even find a real trading buddy with whom you can start collaborating, for example, on backtesting and improving strategies. Wouldn’t that be a good enough reason for you to start keeping a public trading journal?
Just think of all the new friendships and benefits it can bring!
11. Creating A Public Track Record
Do you intend to raise capital from investors in the future? Do you want to prove to haters that your trading strategy works? Or do you want to demonstrate your credibility in the trading community?
Your public trading journal can help you with all of this!
Simply keep an accurate record of your trades and continuously post verified information about the movements in your trading account (see how to do this at the end of this article).
This way, you will create a public track record that no one will be able to question. It will become bulletproof evidence of your ability to generate a positive equity curve over the long term.
Brilliant, don’t you think?
What Information Should Your Public Trading Journal Contain?
The simple answer is: whatever you think is important, write it down!
If you’re more like me, you’ll probably only want to record the most important data, such as stop-loss and profit target price data, entry price, and a few other basics.
However, if you prefer a more sophisticated form of trading journal, you might, for example, include information about your current state of mind, news results, correlated market movements, and so on. There are no limits.
Just choose a form of journal that you can stick to for the long term.
Whichever option you choose, here’s a list of what you can include in your public trading journal:
- Entry date
- Entry price
- Entry reasons
- Stop-loss price
- Stop-loss movement reasons
- Exit date
- Exit price / profit target(s) price
- Exit reasons
- Symbol / ticker name
- Trade direction
- Number of shares / contracts / lots traded
- Total profit or loss from the trade
- Economic reports or announcements made around or during the time of the trade
- Your thoughts, hopes, and fears that you had before opening the position and while the position was open
- Screenshot at time of entry
- Screenshot after exit
- Screenshot of all relevant time frames
- Screenshot of all relevant correlated markets
- Mistakes or Learning from the trade
- Market condition
- Missed Trades
How To Verify Data In Your Public Trading Journal
There are two ways to verify the authenticity of your trades.
1. Using A Trade Account Tracking Service
For example, if you use MetaTrader or cTrader, you can use a service like Myfxbook, which can read and verify the data in your account and compile a summary of basic metrics.
This is not only a time-tested way of verifying the authenticity of executed trades, but it is also very convenient.
2. Recording Executed Trades On Video
Any trading platform can display executed trades directly on charts or through statements. Thus, depending on the frequency of your trades, you can make a short video once a week or once a month where you record all these trades and publish it on your YouTube or Vimeo channel.
Then paste the link to that video into your public trading journal, and you’re done. If you do this activity honestly and regularly, there will be no one who can question your results.
Of course, you can combine both of the above methods for even more credibility.
Conclusion
I hope you now understand the enormous power of keeping a public trading journal. It’s not an exaggeration to say that recording and sharing your executed trades can be a real game changer in your trading career.
In addition to the benefits listed above, you will learn things that you probably wouldn’t normally learn about and significantly shorten your learning curve.
You will become more confident, more disciplined, more experienced, and certainly more profitable.
So, don’t be lazy. Show your determination to succeed, and start today!
If your trading is focused on ICT concepts, we will be happy to host your public trading journal on our ICT Sharks forum.
