Trade Tracking and Reviews
By Cliff Clark
(This is a rewrite of an article that a saved from years ago, the original author is unknown, it's been updated for our methodology)

Overview:

Most of you see the trading activity as the moment in time when you buy and sell a stock or option. This is the glamorous part of trading. But few of you consider that this portion should only occupy about 1/3 of your time. The rest of the time you should be preparing for the trading session and after market evaluating your trades and results. Few of you even consider the evaluation and tracking part of trading to be of any importance, and even if you consider its importance, few of you are willing to put in the time needed to properly track and evaluate your results. Why? These are actually the tasks that will help make you successful. While preparing for and trading are obviously important. How can you continually improve if you don't track and review what you are doing? Obviously for most of you your current results show you that you can't. Below you'll see that it really isn't that hard of a task and there are ways you can actually add some fun into it.

There are two major tasks you must complete to achieve a successful evaluation of your trading activity. You must evaluate both the quality of your trades, and the overall numerical results of your trading.

Trade Review:

Have you ever taken a trade which looked great at 9:40 AM, but after stopping out, you look at it again after 4:00 PM and wonder what the hell was I thinking, was that a quality setup?. The pressures we face as traders during regular market hours can skew our perception of reality and of the charts. The thought that you're about to miss out on a great opportunity can make you chase a stock, taking poor entry. Many things can and will happen during a trading session. Your memory is very selective, you will remember the good trades while making every effort to forget the bad ones. This is why we want to review each trade at the end of each day. I know sometimes you don't have time to do that so here is a suggestion on some steps that can help. I want you to take a screen shot of the chart at the time of your entry, at the time you move your stop (if any) and at the time you either reach target or stop out. If your plan allows you to take profits along the way take screen shots of those as well. Why do this? Because you can see exactly where the stock was at each point. This will make analyzing the trade infinitely easier since you won't have to go into the chart after the market closes to see where it was, by that point the chart will look radically different, especially on the lower time frames. Along with this it is also beneficial to write down your thoughts at the time you took the trade. I know writing everything down is time consuming, you can also record yourself if that is more convenient for you, you can use audio or video for this. With all of the information you just gathered you are well armed to do a thorough trade review to see how brilliant you were or perhaps discover that you let the idiot take control of that trade, then again maybe you took a really good pattern and it just didn't work. You'll never know unless you review and if you don't know you can't and won't improve.