Automating a journal for yen pairs: a checklist

[FXS London Scalper]

Much of a trading journal can be automated. Export the MT5 history each evening and let a small script fill in what used to be typed by hand.

What a script can add per trade:

• Session tag from the open time (Asia, London, New York).
• Spread at entry, from your own spread log.
• Distance from the Tokyo session high and low, a useful reference on USDJPY and EURJPY.
• Hold time in seconds.

What's better written by hand: the reason for the trade in one sentence, and a rating of the entry from 1 to 3. Automating the reason with tags is tempting, but notes tend to get worse when you stop thinking about them.

One yen-specific field worth flagging manually: whether the trade came within an hour of a comment from a Japanese official. There's no clean free feed for that, and those comments explain a lot of odd yen behaviour.

A tip for the Tokyo range: define it in your script by clock time in Tokyo, not broker server time, and handle the fact that Japan doesn't change clocks while Europe and the US do.

Anyone automated more than this? Where did you draw the line?