Journal craft: how I teach it to a mentee

[LondonScalper]

Teaching someone to keep a trading journal turned out to be harder than teaching them a setup. The setup is concrete. The journal is a habit, and habits are hard to hand over.

I've mentored three traders over the years, and with the most recent one I finally found an approach that worked. It's built in stages, over about six weeks.

Weeks one and two: only facts. Time, pair, direction, entry, stop, exit, result in R. Nothing else. The goal is to make the habit automatic before adding anything that requires thought. If she missed a trade, we discussed why it wasn't logged, not what the trade was.

Weeks three and four: add one line of reason for each entry, written before the trade. Not after. This is where most people struggle, because writing before the trade forces you to have a reason.

Weeks five and six: add one line after each exit, answering only "did I follow the plan, yes or no, and if no, what was different?" No emotional essays.

From then on, a weekly review. Thirty minutes on Sunday, where she reads back the week and picks the single most common rule break. Just one. That becomes the focus for the next week.

What didn't work with the earlier mentees: giving them my full journal template on day one. It had 22 columns. They both gave up within a month.

Start small, add slowly, and keep the weekly review short. That's most of it.

[Shadow Trader]

The staging is the part I'd copy. Facts only for two weeks sounds almost too simple, but you're right that the habit has to exist before it can carry any thought.

One addition I've found useful in the first two weeks is reconciling the journal against the broker statement every Friday. The only metric is trades logged divided by trades taken, and until that is 100% for two weeks running, nothing new gets added.

For weeks three and four, I'd give the mentee a fixed list of setup names, five at most, and the reason line has to start with one of them. Free text reasons drift into stories, and a trade that fits none of the five names is already useful information.

The timestamp matters too. If the reason line is written in a spreadsheet, I ask for the time it was typed, because a reason written two minutes after the entry is usually a justification.

Did she ever move on to the softer columns, like sleep or mood before the session? I'm curious whether those helped her or whether facts and plan adherence were enough.

[Shadow Trader]

LondonScalper, the weekly review rule of picking only one break is what I enforce hardest with a mentee. The moment the Sunday list grows to three fixes, nothing gets fixed and week seven looks like week one.

I also ban the 22 column template you mentioned until month three. If they ask for my full sheet early I give them the five fact fields only, printed on one page, and refuse the rest.

Thirty minutes on Sunday is a hard cap on the call. We stop even if they want to keep talking setups, because the review is about the journal habit, not a free lesson.

When a mentee skips the Friday broker reconcile I restart the two week facts clock. No new columns until the log rate is clean again.

On soft columns, sleep and mood never helped my own book enough to teach them. Did she find a single soft field that changed behaviour, or did plan adherence stay the whole story?