Last night I updated my PL Trades journal. I entered around 50 closed trades or so. If you want to know more about PL Trades, I will discuss more of them later on.
Keeping a journal of all my trades was one of the first things I learned when I decided to try to learn and study stock trading back in 2019. Back then, I still didn't realize the importance of keeping a trade journal. But I keep journaling my trades because it is one of the most highlighted and advised things to do in any stock trading book I've read. The only inconsistency I had in terms of keeping a stocks journal, is that I used so many types of stocks trading journal formats. First, I used the trading journal format of Dr. Alexander Elder, the author of the book "The New Trading for A Living". Later on, I used the trading journal format of Mark Minervini, which is a very very good format.
Later on, I came across a trading journal format shared by one of the Traders Den's members. It was a very very nice format in excel that I'm in love with it and I'm using this format until now. I'm using it specifically in journaling my trades as a TDS student.
I'm also using a Personal Finance software called Quicken. It has a feature that allows me to record my stock's position, and open and close trades apart from its capability to record all other aspects of the personal finance spectrum that needs to be recorded like income expense, assets, net worth etcetera. You can also generate lots of reports from this software.
Quicken is my main journal as I recorded most if not all of my personal finance stuff, such as tracking my assets and liabilities and net worth. Quicken is also my go-to software to record Marge's long-term investments in stocks. I also recorded my PERA or the Personal Equity and Retirement Account contributions on Quicken.
Let me know in the comments section if you are interested to know more about quicken.
If I get a lot of comments about it, I might create a full video about it as well.
Back to the main topic of this video.
If you notice, I talked about lots of journal formats already. So what's the whole point of this? What's the importance of having or keeping a stock journal?
Well, like any other business you really need to record all transactions, because:
1. It is better to write the palest ink than to keep it in your most retentive memory or the palest ink is better than the best memory. It's from a Chinese proverb if I'm not mistaken, don't quote me on that, that I cannot forget until now, which was thought when I was in high school.
2. A good trading journal that records the details of your trade, will provide you lots of different matrices to guide you on how you are going to proceed forward with your trading. A journal can generate reports such as your overall batting average, batting average per trading strategy if you used more than one strategy, your profit factor, edge ratio, trade expectancy, and risk management among many others.
3. A good trading journal will provide you with hints and insights as to which direction your trading journey is headed. Is it heading to disaster or accumulation of wealth?
4. Keeping a journal is done by professional traders, how much more the retail traders, like you and me. So we should keep it we want to be on that pro level.
What I've mentioned right now were just a few of the many good reasons why you should keep a record of all your trades.
Let's take a look at PL Trades, PL trades is a free social stocks trading journal platform created for those who traded stocks in the Philippine Stock Market. All you have to do is sign up for an account and you can start recording your trades right away, you can also write what you feel or your emotional state during the trade because there's a place for that too. You can also record your withdrawal and deposits and you can interact also with other users also.
In the beginning, I mentioned that I entered like 50 closed trades last night. Actually, I was like abandoning my journal here as I already maintained two separate journals already. But I realized that it's better also to maintain PL Trades also as this is also a very good place to keep a journal to show transparency on what I am doing here in this channel because you can view it any time.
At the end of the day, I wanted to prove if I can succeed in stocks trading if really I can make a living out of stocks trading and be a full-time stocks trader soon. I believe PL Trades is a good place to share.
If you do not have a trading journal yet, or you are still undecided as to which trading journal format to use, well, PL Trades is a good place to start.
If you are interested in all or any one of the trading journals I've mentioned in this video, just click the corresponding link below. Most of them are free to use. But if you choose to use Quicken, the link I provided, included an affiliate link, which means when you click my link and buy Quicken, I will get a small commission without any added cost from your end.
Thank you so much for watching, if you found this video helpful, give it a thumbs up, share the video and subscribe to my channel if you haven't already. Thank you and I will see you at the next one.
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