Track Emotional State and Rule Adherence Alongside P&L

[Fairman]

Add two additional columns to your existing trade journal, beyond the standard price and outcome data: "Followed plan? Yes/No" and "Emotional state at time of entry."

These two fields, tracked consistently and honestly over enough trades, tend to reveal one of the most important patterns available to any trader willing to look at their own data objectively. For a large number of traders, once they actually review this data, their biggest and most costly losses cluster heavily around entries marked "No" for plan adherence, combined with specific emotional states — frustration after a prior loss, impatience during a slow session, overconfidence after a winning streak.

This is a genuinely important discovery, because it locates the real problem far more precisely than a vague sense of "I need to trade better." It's not that the underlying strategy is broken. It's that a specific subset of trades — the ones taken outside the plan, during specific emotional states — are dragging down otherwise solid results.

Once you've identified this pattern in your own data, the fix becomes much more targeted and achievable: rather than trying to vaguely "improve overall," you can focus specifically on recognizing the emotional states that predict deviation, and building a habit of stepping away from the platform when you notice those specific states arising, before they translate into an off-plan trade.