Curious what methods TradingQnA members use
for post-market trade review.
Do you:
I built a tool for this — happy to share
if anyone’s interested. But first want to
understand how serious traders here approach
this.
Not many serious traders here. 
6 months of journaling every trade — what the data actually told me
I started keeping a proper trade journal 6 months ago after a particularly bad week where I lost 8,00 in 3 days and genuinely had no idea why.
Before that I was doing what most of us do — checking the Kite P&L at the end of the day, feeling bad about the red days, feeling good about the green ones, and not really learning anything from either.
So I started logging every trade. Entry, exit, strategy, why I took it, what I felt when I entered. The works.
Here’s what came out after 6 months and 100+ trades:
I thought my best strategy was momentum breakouts. The data said my highest win rate 68% is actually on gap fill trades. I was mostly ignoring that setup.
I lose money on Fridays. Consistently. Every single month. Something about end-of-week impatience makes me overtrade. I had no idea until I looked at the numbers by day of week.
My average winning trade is held for 4 days. My average losing trade is held for 2.5 Days. Classic. I cut winners early and let losers run, and I was completely unaware of it until I saw the holding time data.
My best month was not my highest P&L month. It was the month where my win rate and profit factor were both highest. Those two months were different by ₹5000 in P&L but the “worse” month had much more consistent execution.
The journaling itself didn’t make me more money overnight. But it made me stop lying to myself about what kind of trader I actually am versus what kind of trader I think I am. That gap was large.
Anyone else here who journals consistently — curious what surprised you most when you looked back at your own data? Especially for equity traders/F&O traders, would love to know which metrics you track beyond basic P&L.
I keep a desktop notepad file where I write down important lessons and mistakes I’ve made.
I don’t check it often, but I enjoy flipping through it as a throwback to past experiences.
The problem is that over time, many of the notes lose their relevance.
The market is always changing, and as I adjust my strategies to the changing market dynamics, a lot of what I wrote down no longer applies.
In practice, the entries often feel out of context, which makes it hard to use them for real improvement.
Because of that, I sometimes feel like maintaining the journal or reviewing past mistakes is a waste of time in a dynamically changing market environment.
Lord has spoken no need for us mortals to continue on this thread😉
Ah. Confused me. Guessing who is who now. 
In the sense that you rarely get the same opportunity again to capitalize from a corrected or modified behavioral change.
I never found any actual use for it, the note taking part, marking things as mistakes, taking lessons from small sample of trades. Just a waste of time.
Maintaining trade log data and being able to analyze it to understand whats happening is very important though.
But one can overdo it too and over optimize + need decent sample. Need to keep balance but this imo is essential to adapt when needed or atleast be able to understand whats working whats not.
This imo needs some discretion too, cant just automate it all.
I use my own tools for this, but its not rocket science. If one is good with excel, that can do.
This is a genuinely underrated problem with text-based journaling — the notes age out faster than the market cycles.
The distinction that helped me: there are two types of things worth journaling, and only one of them goes stale.
Setup notes go stale. “This breakout worked because of X market condition” — yes, if the condition changes, the note loses relevance. You’re right about this.
Behavioural data doesn’t go stale. Whether you cut winners early, whether your FOMO entries have a lower win rate than your planned entries, whether you trade worse on Fridays — these patterns are about you, not the market. They change slowly if at all. I’ve been tracking this for over a year and my behavioural edge and weaknesses have been remarkably consistent even as my strategies evolved.
The insight shift for me was stopping the practice of writing paragraph notes about each trade and instead logging structured data — entry time, exit time, emotion at entry, did I follow my plan yes or no. Takes 60 seconds per trade. No prose. No lengthy reflections that go stale.
After 3 months of that, the patterns in the numbers told me more than 3 years of written notes ever did. My planned trades have a 64% win rate. My improvised trades have a 31% win rate. That ratio has held across 4 different market conditions now. It’s not going stale.
The problem with most journals isn’t the journaling — it’s journaling the wrong thing.
Completely agree on the note-taking being mostly noise. The lesson from a small sample rarely survives contact with the next 50 trades — the market gives you a counterexample fast enough to make the note feel wrong.
The data analysis part is where I landed too. Not lessons, not prose — just structured fields that accumulate into a large enough sample to trust. Entry time, exit time, strategy tag, emotion at entry, plan-follow yes/no. After a few months the numbers do the talking without you having to interpret anything subjectively.
Curious what you use for the analysis side. Excel with pivot tables, or something else? I find the friction of maintaining formulas is what causes most people to abandon it — not the journaling concept itself.
I am an algo trader. I dont review my trades daily. I do look at P&L from broker reports. Sometimes I check how my backtest deviated from Live. I am a compulsive researcher and keep testing something or the other, but never used a journal. A lot of my trading is STBT multi leg OS with ID adjustments, which I dont think is intuitively captured by journal platforms.
Logging is all automated in custom code. I analyze when needed, generally in bad times to understand whats happening. Sometimes that might lead to system improvement but these days my current systems are somewhat mature now so best i can do is look at risk.
I keep feeling i am talking to AI when i see AI text …
It is. But using AI is common these days and I wouldnt normally mind it if there is an effort by the poster to participate in the discussion… What concerns me is that @Astha_Mishra two posts are just apart by 2 min - clearly indicating copy/paste of AI without understanding enough about the discussion.
I entered your post into Perplexity and asked for a reply, and it started like this…
Pretty much agree with this. The note-taking part can easily turn into noise
Well as it seemed, another marketing push. This time towards glorious trade journals.
Maybe he will make a duplicate account afterwards to ask for link.
Fair point and I won’t pretend otherwise — I did use AI to help draft some of my replies. That’s on me.
But the underlying experience is real. I’ve been trading for 4 years, I do track my trades, the behavioural patterns I described are from my own data. The AI just helped me articulate it more clearly than I would have on my own.
I’ll write my own posts going forward. Appreciate the callout — this community is clearly sharp enough to spot it, which is exactly why it’s worth being here.
And you use AI to to type this out.
Omg. 
I maintain a Excel spreadsheet for the trading entries and have review session where I look at chart screenshots.
Journaling can be helpful as well however, using Excel is more reliable due to its flexibility.
So in my opinion, consistent review is far more valuable than keeping just a P&L sheet.
You mentioned earlier that you built EdgeLog. And now you are saying you “gave it a shot”… making it look like you are a customer…
Don’t do this.
@Astha_Mishra So you deleted your shill post where you were posing as a client, which was obviosly you making a mistake as you were unable to manage all the fake narratives you peddle along with your chatGPT posts.
Shame on you and that so called ‘edgelog’ nonsense.
@Meher_Smaran plenty of shills here nowadays. Spoils the veracity of the forum.
I mostly use a simple Excel sheet to track my trades—entry, exit, reason for trade, and mistakes. P&L from Kite by Zerodha is useful, but it doesn’t really help with improving strategy. Reviewing trades regularly makes a big difference over time.
Your tool sounds interesting—would like to check it out.