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Something that shows up in plenty of trade logs: the sloppiest entries cluster at the end of long screen days. Wider slippage on market orders, stops a tick too tight, a click with the wrong lot size.

Part of it is likely tired eyes. After hours at a monitor, small differences between 1.08502 and 1.08520 get harder to read quickly, and a scalp lives on those differences. Part of it is sleep. Short nights are widely linked to slower reactions and poorer judgement, and a 5-pip target leaves no room for either.

None of that is exotic. Still, hardly anyone tracks hours slept next to P&L, even though the data costs one number a day.

A scalper after a 7-hour night and a scalper after four hours aren't really taking the same trade, even on an identical setup.

Do you log sleep or screen hours anywhere, and has a pattern ever shown up that surprised you?

I started logging hours slept and hours at the screen about eight months ago, mostly out of curiosity, and the pattern was clearer than I expected. On days after less than six hours of sleep my average loss per losing trade was noticeably bigger, mainly because I was late moving stops and once or twice entered with the wrong size.

The screen hours showed something similar. My first two hours were consistently my best, and anything after the fourth hour was close to break even at best. Once I saw that in the numbers it was easy to accept a hard stop on session length, which I'd been resisting for ages.

Now I keep one column for sleep and one for start time, and if I slept badly I trade half size or just watch. It feels like leaving money on the table, but the journal says the opposite, and I trust the journal more than my mood.