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Logging the trades I didn't take, my missed setups column and what it taught me

most journals only record trades I took. I started adding a section for setups that met my criteria but I skipped, and a short reason why. It's been more useful than I expected.

Looking at it after a month, I saw I was skipping a lot of valid setups right after a losing trade. I'd lost one, felt cautious, and then missed the next two, which happened to be winners. That's the reverse of the usual overtrading problem. It was fear, and it was costing me.

Other reasons were more reasonable, like skipping because of news or because the spread was wide. Those I was happy with. The data lets me split the skips into good ones and bad ones.

The bad ones, like fear after a loss or being distracted, are the ones I can work on. I added a rule that if I skip a valid setup, I have to write why in a few words. It makes me think about whether it's a real reason or an excuse.

It's not about regretting what didn't happen. It's about finding patterns in my own behaviour.

For anyone setting this up, I keep the skipped setups in the same spreadsheet as my real trades, just with a column marking them as not taken. I record where the entry, stop and target would have been and then fill in what would have happened later, without counting it in my real stats. Keeping it in the same sheet means I can filter and compare the two groups easily, and I can see whether my skipped trades would have done better or worse than the ones I took.

One pattern that came out for me was time of day. I skipped far more valid setups in the last hour of my session than earlier on. Partly tiredness, partly feeling like I had already done enough. Seeing that made me decide to either trade the full session properly or end it earlier on purpose. Drifting through the last hour half paying attention was the worst of both, since I was neither resting nor trading well. Picking one and sticking to it has made my sessions calmer.