But the only good Trading Journal that exists is the one you will use regularly warts and all. Everybody loves to journal their profits, but start skipping this exercise when losses start piling up. Any journal that is easy to fill and you are sure you can be consistent with it, go for it.
If you are using a platform, someone else’s journal, brokers have been coming out with their own Journalling tools because of the demand from the traders. Zerodha recently came out with a cool tagging feature in which you can journal while trading itself. You can check that out. Dunno if other brokers have it, haven’t tried them.
If you are building it yourself, in a spreadsheet, register or any medium of your choosing, start simple with very limited info. The more boxes to fill in, the higher the chances of never seeing the sheet ever again.
Once you have become consistent with the journal and actually like to sit with it regularly. Add more information into it which gives you more insights about what you are doing right and doing wrong. Here again the thumb rule for parameters is what is important to you and no one else.
Once even this has been done, extract some maxims from them. Some rules you will never break if it means booking a loss i.e “The Truth” you have derived from the markets. Remember that they are your Truths and no one else’s and there are no wrong “Truths”. They are only yours because what you call Truth, someone rolls it up in a ball, throws it’s out of the window every single day, and still makes more money. Thats just how it is