# 12 Things Every Trade Journal Entry Should Include > Most traders track too little in their journal to get useful insights. Here are the 12 fields that make a trade record actually valuable. **Tags:** trading-journal, entries, checklist, what-to-track **URL:** https://traderjournal.app/trading-journal/12-things-every-trade-journal-entry-should-include --- # 12 Things Every Trade Journal Entry Should Include A trade journal with only P&L data is an accounting record, not a learning tool. The entries that produce real improvement contain enough information to reconstruct the trade context weeks later. Here are the 12 fields that make that possible. --- ## 1. Symbol Which instrument you traded. This sounds obvious but matters for analysis - you need to be able to filter and group trades by instrument to find your most and least profitable pairs. --- ## 2. Direction Buy or sell. Combined with symbol and outcome, this tells you whether you have a directional bias that affects your results. Some traders are consistently better at buying than selling, or vice versa. --- ## 3. Lot Size The size of the position in lots. This is essential for calculating actual risk in dollar terms rather than just pips. --- ## 4. Entry and Exit Price Both prices in full. Not just the pips gained or lost, but the actual price levels. This lets you place the trade on a historical chart during review. --- ## 5. Entry and Exit Time Date and time for both. Time-of-day analysis and day-of-week analysis depend on this data being accurate. If you find that your 4pm trades consistently lose and your 10am trades consistently win, that is a session-specific behavioral pattern worth acting on. --- ## 6. Stop Loss and Take Profit (at entry) The levels you set when you entered, not where they ended up. This is critical for planned risk-reward analysis. If you regularly set a 1:2 R:R and end up closing at 1:0.8, something is happening to your exits that the actual close price does not explain. --- ## 7. Pips The distance between entry and exit in pips. Useful for comparing performance across pairs with different pip values, and for tracking average winning vs losing pip distances. --- ## 8. P&L Breakdown Net P&L alone is not enough. Track: - **Gross profit** - the raw price movement profit - **Commission** - what your broker charged to open and close - **Swap** - the overnight financing cost or credit - **Net P&L** - the final result after all costs Commission and swap matter more than most traders realize. A strategy that shows a 1.4 profit factor on gross P&L might drop to 1.1 after costs. That is a very different risk profile. --- ## 9. Setup / Tag A label describing why you entered. This can be a strategy name (breakout, pullback, reversal), a pattern (inside bar, engulfing, double top), or any classification system that matches how you trade. Tags enable the most useful analysis a journal provides: comparing the performance of different setups to find which ones actually have an edge. --- ## 10. Notes A free-text field for anything that is not captured in the structured fields. What was the market context? What were you watching at entry? What happened during the trade that was unexpected? Two or three sentences is enough. --- ## 11. Mistakes A separate field specifically for logging what you did wrong. Keeping this separate from general notes makes it easy to filter for mistake trades during review, which is where most of the behavioral learning happens. Not every trade has a mistake. A losing trade with good execution is not a mistake - it is variance. A winning trade with a rule violation is still a mistake entry. The mistake field is about execution quality, not outcome. --- ## 12. Rating A 1-5 star score for the overall execution quality of the trade. This lets you run one of the most revealing analyses available: comparing the financial performance of your 5-star trades vs your 1-star trades. Almost universally, traders find their best-executed trades outperform their worst-executed trades significantly - which quantifies the cost of undisciplined trading in dollar terms. --- ## Which Fields Are Most Important If you have to prioritize, start with fields 1-8 and field 9 (tags). These give you the data for meaningful performance analysis. Fields 10-12 (notes, mistakes, rating) add the reflection layer that turns data into improvement. Trader Journal captures fields 1-8 automatically via EA sync from MT4 and MT5. Fields 9-12 are added manually per trade in the app. This split between automatic and manual is designed to minimize friction while maximizing the quality of the record. Download at android.traderjournal.app or ios.traderjournal.app.