Entry reasons written in the journal become useless unless they can be tested
Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2026 10:49 am
A journal line reading "felt like a good entry" gives nothing to analyse later. Neither does "price action looked strong." After a month, the log is full of prose and short on information.
Entries tagged with a specific, checkable condition are different. "Broke the five-minute high with spread under 0.6" can be counted, filtered and compared. Each tag becomes a category, and results by category show which setups actually earn money.
Keep the list short. Five or six setup tags are plenty. Anything that doesn't fit one of them goes under "other," and that category is usually the most expensive.
Adding the spread, the time of day and the seconds since the last trade turns the journal into a dataset.
After a few hundred trades, sorting by tag typically reveals that one or two setups carry nearly all the profit, and one or two quietly lose money.
The discipline is deciding the tag before clicking, not afterwards. A tag chosen after the result is a story.
How are entry reasons recorded, and has the data ever contradicted a favourite setup?
Entries tagged with a specific, checkable condition are different. "Broke the five-minute high with spread under 0.6" can be counted, filtered and compared. Each tag becomes a category, and results by category show which setups actually earn money.
Keep the list short. Five or six setup tags are plenty. Anything that doesn't fit one of them goes under "other," and that category is usually the most expensive.
Adding the spread, the time of day and the seconds since the last trade turns the journal into a dataset.
After a few hundred trades, sorting by tag typically reveals that one or two setups carry nearly all the profit, and one or two quietly lose money.
The discipline is deciding the tag before clicking, not afterwards. A tag chosen after the result is a story.
How are entry reasons recorded, and has the data ever contradicted a favourite setup?