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Strategies & Market Trends : DAYTRADING Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BenThair who wrote (1546)	7/5/1999 5:14:00 PM
From: -	Respond to of 18137

<I do have a question for you. I think that keeping a diary would be beneficial. You have said you use one very effectively. After your post of reviewing your trades, I started to keep one. Thus far I have not been able to achieve any benefit. Could you explain what information you write? Maybe you have a favorite format that you use? Anything that might help.> Ben, I don't try to keep everything in a trading journal - what I'm looking for is to focus on recording any screw-ups -- things where there is room for improvement. My journal is a hybrid of a written journal, an Excel journal on the laptop, and a voice-recorded journal. Eventually it all gets distilled down into a "trading learns and rules" file on the PC. If you can identify a trading error you tend to make consistently, or that keeps popping back up, then give it a name, and watch for it. In the journal I will make entries only two or three times a day, not trying to record data for every trade. I also use a voice recorder to catch important stuff when I'm too busy trading with no time to write or type. I'll be doing a Tiger article on the trading journal - it's a good companion technique to the Equity Curve. I know a Bond Trader down in Miami who averages a half-million a month (and up) in profits - trading 100-contract positions in CBOE Bond Futures. He is one of the most detailed, religious keepers of a trading journal I've ever met (I got the voice recorder idea from him). But don't get me started on him - the guy is amazing, lots to learn there, but too many colorful, OT stories! Good trading, -Steve