Document your personal trading journey. Track daily equity curves, review winning and losing streaks, share trade screenshots, and get constructive feedback.
Elaborate tagging systems tend to collapse. Three tags can be enough:
Session: A (Asia), L (London before 12:00), LL (London after 12:00), N (New York).
Spread at entry: tight, normal, wide. Wide means above 1.5 times your usual for that hour.
State of mind: calm, rushed, frustrated. Recorded before the trade, not after.
After a few hundred trades, split your results by tag value and look at hit rate and mean R in each group. What tends to be informative:
Whether "rushed" or "frustrated" trades do clearly worse than "calm" ones.
Whether wide-spread entries are worse even when the trade works, which shows the cost directly.
Which session is weakest. Most people know, but numbers make it harder to ignore.
The state-of-mind tag is the uncomfortable one, and that's its value. Having to type "frustrated" before clicking often stops the trade before it happens.
Keep the tags fixed for the whole sample. Changing definitions halfway makes the comparison meaningless.
The state-of-mind tag is the one most people drop first, so recording it before the click is the right call. One addition worth considering is a fourth field that is not a tag at all: whether the trade followed the written plan or was taken outside it. It separates two problems that otherwise blur together, a weak setup versus a good setup taken badly, and the fix for each is completely different.
The main pitfall with this kind of split is sample size. A few hundred trades sounds like plenty, but once you divide by four sessions, three spread buckets and three moods, some cells end up with a dozen trades and the mean R in them is mostly noise. It helps to look at one tag at a time first, and only cross two tags when both groups still hold a reasonable number of trades.
Worth checking too is whether the tags overlap. Wide spreads and rushed entries often happen together around data, so a poor result in one group may really belong to the other. Comparing rushed trades taken at normal spread against calm trades at normal spread shows which one is actually doing the damage.
