After a stressful trading day, you’ve put your trading strategy to the test and it surely burned out your energy. Even your emotions overtake you in Forex Trading. Getting tired and pressured, you stop in keeping track of your activities. This will offer you no good. Keeping all the records related to trading will not just help you in identifying how good you are in identifying your trading strategy but also in refining it. The records you keep every day should also be your reference on how you successfully surpassed each trading day, making your life so much easier.
Tips in Keeping Track of Your Trading Losses and Gains
Setting up a spreadsheet
One of the easiest ways you can ever do to track your trades is through the use of the spreadsheet. Setting up the columns for the time of the trade, the assets that you bought, the quantity you purchased, the price, and even the commission, all these things are recorded in the spreadsheet. After that, you create columns that specify what happens by the time your positions are closed. The final step is to calculate the performance of your trades depending on the change of the price security as well as the dollars and percentage that you gained throughout your trade.
Loss and profit statements
At the end of the trade tracking spreadsheet, it should contain the summary of how your trades went: your trading profits based on the percentage you have on your trading capital, the commissions taken from your trading profits, and the win-and-lose transaction ratio. Such information needs to be transferred to another spreadsheet for the tracking of your ongoing success.
By the end of the entire trading week, you can calculate the hourly wage that you had. The said number helps in seeing whether your trading plan makes sense or not.
The importance of a trading diary
Some traders take for granted the use of a trading diary. A trading diary provides information that helps in the assessment of your trading. You can take down notes whenever you make a trade and why you did so. Is it due to the signal raised by your system? Or is it because of your hunch? Or you saw a good opportunity to trade.
To make it less time-consuming, other traders create a form and a dozen copies that they can just fill up whenever they have free time during the day. Others also ready predetermined indicators that will match their trading strategies. After a day of trading, they compile their diary sheets and refer to it in the future. When the time comes and they want to evaluate their strategies and performance, they can just check their trading diary.
If you are too pressured to fill in your trading diary because your style in Forex trading is really fast, you may come up with a quick tally indicating the trades you did based on your hunches, the signal in your system, and the trades you did based on the interpretations of the market.
John Smith 