How to Keep a Trading Journal: A Routine With a Time Budget
Four steps with a time budget each, a weekly review in a fixed order, and what to cut when a step overruns. Small enough to do on a bad day.
3 Nov 2026 · 5 min read
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Keep it small enough that you would still do it on your worst day. Journaling is a habit before it is a document, and a journal fails by being abandoned in week three, not by missing a field. The routine below has four steps with a time budget each, and the budget is the point: if a step overruns, cut a field, not the step.
The routine and its time budget
The minutes are a budget we suggest, not a measurement. The weekly total uses a made-up 10 trades a week; scale it to your own count.
| Step | When | Minutes each | What goes in it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before entry | Per trade | 1 | Setup name, planned stop and reward-to-risk, one line on why, entry screenshot. |
| After close | Per trade | 1.5 | Result in R, a grade for how you executed, a mistake tag if there was one, any plan changes. |
| End of day | Each trading day (5) | 3 | Check every trade of the day has an entry. Fill gaps while you still remember. |
| Weekly review | Once a week | 25 | Group by setup, then by grade. Read the notes on the worst and best three. Write one thing to change. |
At 10 trades a week that is 65 minutes: 10 × (1 + 1.5) + 5 × 3 + 25. At three times the trades the per-trade part triples and the review does not, which is why the review is capped and the per-trade steps are the ones to trim.
Setting it up in one sitting
- Pick one place: a spreadsheet, a notebook or a journal tool. Two places is zero places.
- Write your setup list. Three to six names, spelt once. New setups wait for the weekly review.
- Choose the fields from the field list. Start with the ones marked Keep.
- Decide what 1R means and what each grade means, in a sentence apiece, and write them on the first page.
- Book the weekly review as an appointment, at a time you are not trading.
The weekly review, in order
- Count trades taken and entries written. If they differ, the gap is the first finding.
- Group by setup. Look at the count and the average result in R for each, not only the total.
- Group by grade. Is your execution grade tracking your results, or not?
- Read the notes on the three worst and the three best trades. Look for a sentence you keep writing.
- Write one change for next week, small enough to check. Next week's review starts by checking it.
What to skip
- Back-filling a month. Start from today. Reconstructed entries record what you now believe.
- Perfect screenshots. A rough capture at entry beats a tidy one you never take.
- Daily statistics. A day is a handful of trades and mostly noise. Measure over a window of weeks.
- Fields you have not used in a month. Delete them.
When you miss a day
Fill the entries from the platform history with the facts, and leave the judgement fields blank rather than guessing. A blank is honest; a guess made two days late is a story. Then do the next trade properly. The routine survives missed days; it does not survive a guilt backlog.
Where Trepeat comes in
We're working on a free journal and a backtester, with no date yet. Today Trepeat is a trade copier for MT4, MT5 and cTrader, currently on demo accounts, and you can add notes, a grade and screenshots to any copied trade once it closes, with a calendar of your results.
The grade, model and notes are the fields the steps above use. The journal can sort by grade and model and filter by grade, which is what the weekly review groups by. The result in R is yours to write in notes. If you are still choosing a place, see the types of journal; for the end-of-day and weekly steps as files, the daily and weekly review templates.
Written by the Trepeat team.