Building a trading journal: what I learned tracking my own data

I started trading in 2024. Not seriously — small positions, learning the mechanics. But I noticed I had no idea whether I was actually improving or just getting lucky.

So I built TradeLog.

What TradeLog does

Simple premise: log every trade. Entry price, exit price, position size, instrument, date, and a short note on the thesis. The app calculates everything else — win rate, average R:R, drawdown, streaks.

Nothing you can't do in a spreadsheet. But a spreadsheet doesn't show you a chart of your win rate over time. It doesn't highlight that your Friday afternoon trades have a 34% win rate versus 61% on Tuesday mornings.

What the data showed me

I overtrade after a loss. Classic tilt. I knew this intellectually. Seeing it as a chart — three or four trades clustered in the hour after a losing trade, all red — made it impossible to ignore.

My thesis notes were useless. I'd write "momentum play" or "breakout setup" and think I was documenting something. Six months of data and I couldn't find a single note that helped me understand why a trade worked or failed.

The best trades are boring. The ones I remembered most vividly were dramatic. The best trades by R:R were quiet — patient entries, clean exits, no story.

What I changed in the app

I added a mandatory "what would make me wrong" field to the trade entry form. You have to write a falsification condition before you can log an entry. It's annoying. It made the notes useful.

I also added a "cooling off" flag — if you log a loss, the next trade entry shows a yellow banner: "You just took a loss. Is this trade in your plan?"

Annoying. Also useful.

The software lesson

Build tools for yourself first. You'll know exactly what's missing because you'll feel the absence every day.