Journaling the price you planned against the price you got

[Fairman]

Journaling the price you planned against the price you got

A journal entry usually records the actual entry price. It rarely records the price you intended to enter at. The gap between the two is useful information.

The planned price is the level from your setup. The retest of a broken level, the middle of a zone, a specific candle's close. The actual price is where you were filled. On a limit order they're usually the same. On a market order they can be quite different.

The difference comes from a few sources. Hesitation, where you saw the setup but clicked late. Slippage, where the broker filled at a worse price than the one on screen. Chasing, where the setup had moved on and you entered anyway.

Recording both prices, and the difference in pips, separates these effects. Over a month you'll see your average gap. If it's consistently a pip or more on market orders, that's real cost on every trade. If it's much larger on some trades, those are probably the ones where you chased.

The fix depends on the cause. Slippage points to the broker or the time of day. Hesitation points to preparation, which might mean using pending orders more. Chasing points to discipline, and possibly to a rule about the maximum distance from the planned price.

[FXS HongKong Scalper]

Splitting the gap by order type makes this even sharper. Limits and stops will show a near zero gap most of the time, so if they are mixed with market orders the average looks better than your clicking really is. Running the planned versus filled column only for market entries isolates hesitation and slippage. From the Asian desk side, it is also worth tagging the hour. A one pip gap on USDJPY at 09:00 Tokyo, when the fixing flow is running, is a different problem from the same gap at 15:00 when the book is thin and the tape is drifting.

[Fairman]

The planned price needs to be written down before entry for this to work. Recording it afterwards is too easy to adjust in your own favour, even without meaning to. A short note on the desk sheet with the planned level, or a horizontal line on the chart with a label, captures it at the right time. A screenshot of the setup with the level marked does the same job and also helps with the visual review later. Without a record made in advance, the planned price slowly drifts toward wherever you actually got filled. Even a quick label on the chart, timestamped by the platform, counts as an advance record.

[Fairman]

The gap can be expressed as a share of the stop, which makes it easier to compare across trades. A one pip gap on a five pip stop is a fifth of the risk lost before the trade begins. The same gap on a twenty pip stop barely matters. Recording the gap both in pips and as a fraction of stop shows where it really hurts. It also makes it clear why tight stops are especially sensitive to entry quality, since the same late click costs far more on a small stop than it does on a wider one. Seeing that number in the journal often makes traders much more willing to use limit orders on tight stop setups. It's one thing to know that a late click costs something, and another to see that it took a quarter of the planned risk on a dozen trades.

[Fairman]

Limit orders change the question. If you mostly use limits, the planned and actual price will usually match, but you'll miss some trades that never fill. Recording those missed trades, and what happened afterwards, completes the picture. A trader using limits pays the cost in missed entries rather than in worse prices. Comparing the two approaches using your own records shows which costs less for your setups, which is a better basis for choosing an order type than general advice about one being better than the other. Missed trades from limits are easy to log with a quick note of the level and what price did after.

[Fairman]

Over time, this column can also show whether your planning is realistic. If the planned price is regularly far from where price actually goes, and you often have to enter at a worse price or miss the trade entirely, the levels you're choosing might be too ambitious. Price rarely reaches the exact level you'd like. Adjusting the planning slightly, for example planning the entry a little in front of the level, might lead to more trades filled close to plan, and fewer cases where you feel forced to chase. A few weeks of this column is usually enough to show whether the planned levels are realistic.

[FXS Prop Desk]

The gap between planned and actual price is a great addition. For market orders, it also shows how much of the edge is being lost to hesitation rather than slippage. If the planned price was the retest and the fill came several pips later because the trader waited for one more candle, that is a behaviour cost, not an execution cost. Separating the two in the journal, for example with a short note on why the fill differed, makes the column much more useful.

[Shadow Trader]

If slippage were random, roughly half of it would land in the trader's favor. Anyone who logs fills for a few weeks and finds almost every deviation going the wrong way has noticed something real, and it is worth working out why before deciding what it means. There are boring explanations and less boring ones, and the data usually cannot tell them apart on its own.

The boring explanation is how the price is built. When a broker streams a quote and fills against it with a small deviation tolerance, a favorable move usually just gets filled at the requested price instead of the better one, because the system is set up to execute at the quoted level and only deviate when forced to. Negative slippage becomes visible, while a positive one gets quietly swallowed. This is a design choice in some setups, not a flaw, and it means the fill price is capped on the good side and open on the bad side.

The less boring explanation is the one traders worry about, which is selective treatment. Practices differ across brokers: some pass price improvement through, others do not, and some do it only on certain account types. A policy of symmetrical slippage should be written in the execution policy document, and it is often worth reading that paragraph instead of assuming. A number such as the share of fills with positive slippage against negative is far more telling than any single trade.

A fair sample matters here. A hundred fills in calm conditions will say little, whereas the same count taken around news says a lot. Measure each separately, and compare against the requested price, not against the last chart price.

Has anyone done this count on their own account, and what share of fills came back with price improvement?