How Do I Track My Trades?

What should I write down for each trade?

Write down four things before the trade plays out:

1. What you are trading. The ticker, and whether you are buying or selling.
2. Where you are wrong. Your stop.
3. Where you are right. Your target.
4. How much. Your size, in whatever words you already use.

When you write it matters more than how. A trade written up after it closes mostly records how you feel about the result. Written before, the same four things become a prediction you can check.

Does tracking my trades actually help?

Yes, mostly because the numbers are rarely what traders expect. Barber and Odean studied 66,465 households at a large discount broker from 1991 to 1996. The households that traded most earned 11.4% a year while the market returned 17.9%, and the average household earned 16.4%.^[1] Trading more felt productive. Only the numbers showed what it cost.

Should a trading journal be automated?

For logging trades, yes. The trades people forget to log are rarely random: the impulse entry, the bigger size after a loss, the one you would rather not think about. Logging by hand loses those first, so an automated trading journal keeps the record complete instead of flattering.

kappi's Chrome extension picks up a trade as you type it in a chatroom or place it on your brokerage's own screen. It can log each trade automatically or ask you to confirm first. It works with any brokerage, and there is nothing to import and no account to link.

What should trading analytics software measure?

First, every trade. Stats built on some of your trades describe the ones you picked. After that, five numbers tell you most of what matters:

• Profit and loss, over a set period such as the last 30 days.
• How much you kept for the risk you took. kappi calls this RME and shows it once you have 11 closed trades.
• Reward versus risk: how far your target was from your entry, compared with your stop.
• How closely you move with the S&P 500, which shows how much of a result was just the market.
• Number of trades, because a handful of trades proves very little.

A public kappi profile shows all five over the last 30, 100 and 200 days.

Is a PnL calendar tracker enough?

A PnL calendar tracker colours each day green or red. It is good at one thing: showing when your losses bunch up, such as the day after a big loss or the days you traded most. It cannot show whether a day followed your plan, because the calendar only holds results.

Look at it next to the trades behind it. A green day made by breaking your own rules is a worse day than it looks, and only a record of what you planned before each trade shows the difference.

How do I track my win rate honestly?

Count every closed trade. Also keep an eye on break-even trades, trades you sold in pieces, and losing trades you are still holding, because each of those quietly changes the number. Odean found, across 10,000 brokerage accounts, that people sell winning trades much sooner than losing ones,^[2] so a win rate built only on closed trades usually looks better than it is. The win rate guide explains more, and the breakeven win rate calculator shows the win rate you actually need.

Does trade mistake tagging help?

Yes, if you tag the mistake while it is fresh and leave the tag alone. Good tags name a break from your plan: "moved my stop", "sized up after a loss", "chased the entry". A tag added a week later tends to describe the trader you wish you had been.

Better still is a plan that cannot be changed. When your stop and target are sealed before you enter, changing them later shows up in the record, tag or no tag. There is more on this in why trading rules get broken.

kappi is a trade recorder: you log a trade before you know how it turns out, it stays sealed for a delay you choose, and then it is published to a record nobody can edit, which anyone can check without asking kappi. $15/month, no free tier.