I’ve already written about the trade journal and its application in Forex trading a year ago. Since then I’ve been using the journal extensively myself and I saw many disadvantages in it that could be fixed. I won’t be going far into saying how important it is to have a trade journal even if you have some perfect Forex system; I believe that to the most traders it’s quite obvious and if not — they can always read my previous trade journal and its application in Forex trading on this topic.
My last trade journal lacked a separate column for the actual profit/loss expressed in USD (or any other currency) and the column for the current account balance. Such information doesn’t usually characterize the Forex trading system used for trading but is very useful to track the success of a trader, especially if one makes any withdrawals/deposits to the account. Money management becomes much easier when you actually see the changes in the amount of money.
My new trade journal offers a full money tracking capability, including profit/loss per trade and current balance after each trade. It also automatically calculates the percentage profit/loss of positions now. The example trade journal is available for a download (Excel table). It features some example operations with the trading funds and a trading position example.
Update 2012-12-03: One of the blog’s readers had made a significant improvement over my Trade Journal template and was kind enough to share it with everyone — new TradeJournal 2.0 Template. It includes easy currency pairs insertion/sorting, a chart URL field and less
If you have any questions, comments or recommendations regarding further improvements of the Forex trade journal, please, feel free to reply below.
