Don't just record the trade. Measure what it taught you.

What a logged trade looks like

Every field a plan already has, entry, stop, target, size, feeds the journal automatically when the plan is saved from the Trade Planner or any calculator.

What it calculates, not just stores

The two numbers most journals never capture

Recording entry, exit and profit tells you what happened. It does not tell you why, and it cannot distinguish a good decision from a lucky one. Two fields fix most of that, and almost no journal asks for them.

1. Planned R versus realised R. The ratio you intended when you entered, against the one you actually got. The gap is made of partial exits, stops moved to break-even and costs — and it is usually much larger than traders expect.
2. The reason for the exit. Target hit, stop hit, or you closed it. The third category is where most of the edge leaks, and it is invisible unless it is a field.

Why results have to be grouped before they mean anything

An overall win rate across every trade you have ever taken is close to useless: it mixes setups, instruments and market conditions that behave differently. The same hundred trades split by setup often show one that carries the account and two that quietly drain it.

Grouping is also what makes the sample-size problem visible. A hundred trades feels like a record; split across five setups it is twenty each, and twenty trades cannot distinguish a 30% strategy from a 70% one — see does win rate actually matter for the interval.

What to do with the numbers once you have them

Expectancy in R is the figure to track, because it is independent of position size and therefore comparable across months. The expectancy calculator computes it from win rate and average win and loss; the journal supplies those from your own closed trades rather than from an estimate.

How long before any of it means something

Longer than it feels. A win rate estimated from twenty trades carries a 95% interval roughly forty points wide, wide enough to contain both a strong strategy and a losing one.

This is the argument for logging every trade rather than the memorable ones, and for judging a setup on its rule and its expectancy long before its hit rate has anything to say.