I keep two different journals during a prop challenge: one for the firm and one for myself. They answer different questions.
The reviewer journal is short and factual. If a firm or a mentor asks to see my trading, they want to know whether I follow a consistent plan. So it lists date, instrument, entry, exit, size, the setup name and the result in R. No feelings, no long explanations. It should take a stranger two minutes to understand.
My own journal is messy and honest. It has notes like "took this because I was bored", "moved stop because I was scared", "should have skipped, spread was wide". It also tracks things a reviewer does not care about: sleep, how I felt before the session, and whether I broke any personal rule.
Why separate them: when I tried to keep one journal, I started writing it for an imagined reader. I left out the embarrassing parts, which are exactly the parts that help me improve.
Once a week I compare them. If the reviewer journal looks clean but my own journal is full of rule breaks, the clean results are probably luck, and I need to fix the behaviour before the luck runs out.
Does anyone else keep two journals, or one with private sections?
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Journaling for prop reviewers vs journaling for yourself
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LondonScalper
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Shadow Trader
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Re: Journaling for prop reviewers vs journaling for yourself
Two journals is exactly where I ended up too, and for the same reason. The moment I knew someone else might read it, the boredom trades started getting described as range breaks.
The thing that made it workable for me was linking them by ticket number. The reviewer journal is almost entirely built from the broker export plus a setup tag, and the private one is just ticket number, the honest note and a rule break yes or no.
That keeps the reviewer version to a few minutes a day. All the real writing time goes where it's useful, which is the private one.
I'd suggest one small change to the reviewer journal though. Some firms and mentors do ask whether a trade followed the plan, and a single yes or no column there costs nothing and reads better than a perfect looking list.
For the weekly comparison I count private flags per ten trades. When that number goes above two while the R results look good, I treat it the way you describe, as luck I haven't paid for yet.
Do you ever share the private one with anyone, or is it strictly yours? I've shown mine to exactly one person, and that was a deliberate choice.
The thing that made it workable for me was linking them by ticket number. The reviewer journal is almost entirely built from the broker export plus a setup tag, and the private one is just ticket number, the honest note and a rule break yes or no.
That keeps the reviewer version to a few minutes a day. All the real writing time goes where it's useful, which is the private one.
I'd suggest one small change to the reviewer journal though. Some firms and mentors do ask whether a trade followed the plan, and a single yes or no column there costs nothing and reads better than a perfect looking list.
For the weekly comparison I count private flags per ten trades. When that number goes above two while the R results look good, I treat it the way you describe, as luck I haven't paid for yet.
Do you ever share the private one with anyone, or is it strictly yours? I've shown mine to exactly one person, and that was a deliberate choice.
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Shadow Trader
- Posts: 1004
- Joined: Wed Sep 09, 2026 5:19 pm
Re: Journaling for prop reviewers vs journaling for yourself
LondonScalper, the two minute stranger test is how I QC the reviewer journal each Sunday. If I cannot explain the week to an imaginary mentor in under two minutes from that sheet alone, it still has too much colour in it.
Sleep and mood never migrate to the reviewer side. Those lines stay private even when a firm asks for more detail, because once they are shareable I start writing them for approval.
The weekly compare is on the calendar as a fixed 20 minute block. I read private flags first, then R results, never the other way round, so a green week cannot talk me out of a messy process week.
Ticket linking still carries both books. Without it I was rewriting facts from memory into the private note and drifting.
When you do the weekly compare, do you ever freeze size the following week based on private flags alone, even if the reviewer sheet looks clean? That is the lever that finally made the private journal expensive to ignore.
Sleep and mood never migrate to the reviewer side. Those lines stay private even when a firm asks for more detail, because once they are shareable I start writing them for approval.
The weekly compare is on the calendar as a fixed 20 minute block. I read private flags first, then R results, never the other way round, so a green week cannot talk me out of a messy process week.
Ticket linking still carries both books. Without it I was rewriting facts from memory into the private note and drifting.
When you do the weekly compare, do you ever freeze size the following week based on private flags alone, even if the reviewer sheet looks clean? That is the lever that finally made the private journal expensive to ignore.