The Journal

What it is

The Journal captures how you were doing while you traded: the state you were in during a trade, in a few words or a couple of taps, right on the trade. It sits beside the trade's facts as its second track: what happened, and what was happening in you.

Why it is there

The same losing trade means two different things depending on your state. Stopped out while calm and following the plan is variance; stopped out while forcing it after two losses is the pattern. Without the state captured, those two trades look identical later, and the wrong lesson gets learned.

Your state notes also help the coach in the moment. "Frustrated, want it back" written on a live trade tells the coach exactly where you are, and lets it step in with your own pattern work while the trade is still on rather than at the end of the day.

How to use it

Capture it live, in your own words, and keep it honest rather than polished. One phrase is enough: "calm, by the book" is as valuable as "on tilt, forcing." The states you'd rather not write down are the ones worth writing down most. If a trade goes by without one, nothing breaks; the more state you capture, the more precisely the product can help.

The compounding effect

Over weeks, the state track turns your trading history from a list of outcomes into a record of how you perform in each state, which is the thing that actually needs managing. It's also how you get to watch the states themselves change: the same setback that read "on tilt" in month one reading "annoyed, moving on" in month three.