A Trading Journal Template: The 9 Fields to Record per Trade, and How to Review Them Monthly

A working trading journal needs nine fields: entry date, entry price and shares, trigger, thesis, planned stop, planned target, exit details, whether you deviated from plan, and the lesson. Six are written before you buy, three when you sell, and once a month you spend half an hour answering five questions with them. More columns without a review routine, and the journal dies in week three.

Key takeaways

• Most journals die of two things: too many fields to keep up with, and nobody ever reading them back.
• A journal records decisions, not trades: thesis, stop and target are written before the order, not reconstructed afterwards.
• "Deviated from plan?" is the most useful column: a loss taken on plan is a cost; a gain made off plan is luck.
• The monthly review asks five questions: rules vs gut P&L, stop-loss discipline, sold-too-early count, sector concentration, holding-period buckets.
• Stock Compass's journal or a spreadsheet both work. What matters is that the fields stay fixed and you read them back every month.

Why most trading journals die

The first cause is too many fields. Templates circulating online often run to twenty or thirty columns: market regime, mood score, news, screenshots. Week one is diligent, week two has gaps, week three has only prices, week four is blank. When recording costs more than any benefit you can feel, quitting is rational, not a failure of willpower.

The second cause is no review loop. The journal itself produces nothing; all of its value comes from reading it back. If you have never summarised the entries at month-end, recording was a ritual. That also gives you a test for every column: if the monthly review does not use it, do not record it.

The nine fields: what, why, and an example

The ticker is the row label and is not counted. Six fields are written before you buy, three when you sell.

Record the decision, not the trade

Your broker statement already has the date, price and share count. What the journal adds is what the statement cannot contain: why you did it, and how you intended to get out.

That is why fields 4, 5 and 6 must be written before the order. A thesis written afterwards is contaminated by the result: winners make every reason sound right; losers get quietly rewritten as "I had a bad feeling." A stop and target entered after the sale are not a plan, they are a description.

If you cannot write one sentence of thesis or settle on a stop price, the trade is not thought through yet; do not place the order. For how to set the stop and size the position around it, see take-profit and stop-loss rules and position sizing: risk per trade.

The most useful column: deviated from plan?

If you could keep only one review field, keep this one. It sorts every closed trade into four boxes:

• On plan, won: the system is working.
• On plan, lost: the cost of doing business, not a mistake. A stop set in advance and then hit belongs here.
• Off plan, won: the most dangerous box. A good outcome teaches you to remember the "flash of insight," which makes the next deviation easier.
• Off plan, lost: the easiest box to fix, because the pain and the error point the same way.

Without this column you can only see P&L. With it you can see how much of the P&L came from the system and how much from improvisation. Always write the reason when you deviate, even half a sentence. After three months the reasons will repeat, and that repetition is the thing to fix. On why in-the-moment decisions lose to rules set in advance, see why you can never execute your stop-loss.

The monthly review: five questions, half an hour

The review is not re-reading every entry. It is pooling all trades closed in the month (or the last 90 days) and answering five questions:

1. Rules vs gut: how many trades, what win rate and average return on each side? (field 3) Wait for at least five trades on each side before drawing conclusions.
2. Among losers, how many lost clearly more than the planned stop allowed? (field 5) This is stop-loss discipline. Count a loss that overshoots the stop by more than two percentage points as a violation, and note the worst one.
3. Among winners, how many kept rising more than 5% after you sold? What was the average miss? (fields 6 and 7) This is the sold-too-early count. Selling before the target and then watching the stock reach it is the classic case.
4. Is the P&L concentrated in one or two sectors? A profitable sector may be skill or that month's hot theme; a sector that keeps losing is a question about whether you understand it.
5. Split by holding period into four buckets, which has the best win rate? (fields 1 and 7) Use 0–2 days, 3–5, 6–10 and 11+. If you meant to swing trade but 11+ days wins and 0–2 days loses, impulsive short trades are dragging you down.

The answers usually yield one or two things to change. Write them at the top of next month's journal and check them at the next review.

One complete entry, open to close

Here is a hypothetical Hong Kong stock run through all nine fields (fees excluded):

• Entry: 2026-06-03, HK$42.00 × 500 shares, HK$21,000 invested.
• Trigger: strategy signal. The "20-day breakout with volume" strategy fired a buy after the close on 2 June.
• Thesis: close above the 20-day high, volume 1.6x its 20-day average, ADX 28.
• Planned stop: HK$39.50 (−6%), maximum loss HK$1,250 on the trade.
• Planned target: HK$48.30 (+15%), reward-to-risk 2.5 to 1.
• Exit: 2026-06-24, HK$46.20, reason "manual take-profit." Realised +10.0%, HK$2,100, held 15 trading days.
• Deviated from plan?: Yes. Reason: "Still 4.5% short of target; the index sold off hard that day and I sold to protect the gain."
• Lesson: "Thesis unchanged, stop not hit, target not reached. Selling when none of the three happened is not taking profit, it is panic. Next time either wait for the target or raise the stop to breakeven once the position is up, instead of changing the plan on the day."

At month-end this entry shows up in three places at once: one winner in the rules group; one row in the sold-too-early count (the stock reached HK$49.80 two weeks later, 7.8% above the exit); and one deviation. It made money, and it was an execution error.

How this works in Stock Compass

Stock Compass's trade journal is built around these nine fields and is wired to your strategy signals. It does not connect to a broker or place orders; every entry is typed in by you.

Opening: on a holding or a signal card, click "Log open position" and enter the entry date, price and shares, then pick the trigger (Strategy signal / Discretionary / Other). Choosing "Strategy signal" lists this ticker's buy signals from the last 14 days with the most recent pre-selected, so the trade is tied to the strategy that fired it. Then fill in the thesis, planned stop and planned target; optional in the form, but fill them every time.

Closing: click "Close position," enter the close date, price and shares to sell. The free tier matches cost basis first-in, first-out; Pro lets you choose FIFO, LIFO or hand-pick lots, and saves the per-lot attribution. Then pick the close reason (five classes), answer "Deviated from plan?", write the reason if yes (required), and add the lesson.

Reviewing: the "My Trade Journal" page shows "By rules" versus "By gut feel" with count, win rate and average return (a verdict appears once each side has at least five trades); a four-panel attribution grid with Sector P&L, Stop-Loss Discipline (benchmarked against the stop rule in your active strategy), Sold Too Early, and Holding Period win rates across the four buckets; and per-strategy signals fired, follow rate and win rate. Everything exports to CSV.

No Stock Compass needed. Open a blank spreadsheet, paste the line below as the header row, one trade per row, and answer the five questions at month-end with filters and a pivot table:

ticker, entry_date, entry_price, shares, trigger, strategy_or_signal, thesis, planned_stop, planned_target, exit_date, exit_price, exit_reason, deviated_from_plan, deviation_reason, lesson, return_pct

Common mistakes

• Writing the thesis and stop after the fact: reasons written after a win all sound right. That is rationalisation, not recording. If you cannot write it, do not buy yet.
• Journaling only the losers: profitable deviations are the addictive ones. Fill all four boxes, especially "off plan, won."
• Reviewing P&L instead of execution: monthly P&L is mostly the market. Deviation rate, stop violations and sold-too-early count are what you control.

Summary

A trading journal is worth exactly what you can answer from it at month-end. Nine fields are enough: before you buy, record the trigger, thesis, stop and target; when you sell, record the reason, whether you deviated, and the lesson. The "deviated from plan?" column separates luck from system, and the five review questions keep you changing one thing a month. Stock Compass's journal ties each trade to the signal that triggered it and builds the attribution views; a spreadsheet works too, provided the columns never change and you read it back monthly.