Video Transcript
Now, one of the biggest mistakes I made when I started trading was this. I was trading, but I wasn’t recording anything. I only looked at the final result, profit or loss. But if you don’t know why you won or why you lost, you cannot improve. You cannot fine-tune your strategy. You’re just guessing, right? When I was testing new strategies in the past, I did it all wrong. I only watched the equity curve, and if it went up, then, yeah, it was great. If it went down, I threw the strategy away. But this is what I realized later. Many strategies fail not because they are bad, but because we don’t understand their strengths and weaknesses. Maybe the strategy works great on EUR/USD, but not on indices. Maybe it does well on Wednesdays and Thursdays for some reason, but performs terribly on Mondays. Maybe it needs a different time frame. Maybe one small filter could turn it from mediocre to profitable. But the only way to discover that is with a proper trading journal, real data, and real tracking. When I didn’t have a journal, I had no chance of improving anything. I was stuck in a loop with no progress, right? But journaling can really break that cycle. And I know that traders hate it. It feels like extra work. It’s boring. But if you want to get better, there’s not really any substitute for it. So, we kind of have to do it. And that’s why today I track everything. I track which instrument I traded, which setup I used, the time of day, the day of the week, the risk-to-reward ratio, everything. And then I use those data points to analyze which market gives me the highest return, which days I perform the best, which setups have the best win rate, and so on. This is the path to improvement, right? Data-driven progress.
Now, there is one more thing that goes hand in hand with journaling, and the thing is that you must have a clear trading plan, and you must follow it. Because if you don’t follow your plan, then all the data you collected in your journal becomes useless, right? It’s not data about your strategy; it’s data about random trading decisions. So, if you want to test a system properly, you need to trade that system properly, right? Back when I started, I actually did write a trading plan. Most traders do, I think, at least a basic version of it. But to make real progress, your plan needs to be detailed. It needs to be crystal clear. No guessing, no “I’ll decide later.” You need to have a written plan that tells you exactly what setups you use to enter a trade and exactly what the setup needs to look like. How to set a take-profit and stop-loss. How much to risk per trade, how to manage the position, what to do when you’re in a drawdown, and so on. And then you need to follow it 100%. Only then does your journal become powerful, because only then do you get real data that you can trust.
And I get it. This is another thing traders hate doing. Writing rules sounds boring. They want to skip straight to the fun part, which is placing trades. And that’s exactly what I did when I started. I knew that a trading plan and a journal were important, but I tried to do it, you know, just a little bit, just the bare minimum, so I could get to the charts quickly, right? And the result? No progress. Now, I know the simple truth. Without a detailed trading plan and a proper journal, you cannot really improve. So, if you guys are serious about trading, then do this. Write a detailed trading plan. Follow it. Track everything in a trading journal, and then improve using your own data. This is how you turn your trading into a professional process.
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