“I felt anxious today” is a feeling. It is not data, and it will never once tell you to size down. The point of journaling psychology is to turn your mental state into something you can sort, count, and correlate against money.
Most traders either ignore their head entirely or drift into a paragraph of feelings that reads well and changes nothing. Both fail for the same reason: an emotion you can’t measure is an emotion you can’t manage. Here’s how to log your state so it actually earns its place next to your P&L.
Why ‘I felt anxious’ notes are useless without structure
Free-text mood notes have two problems. First, they’re written after the trade, so they’re colored by the result — a loss feels like anxiety, a win feels like confidence, even when your actual state was identical. Second, and worse, you can’t do anything with them at scale. Fifty paragraphs of feelings can’t be sorted into “which state costs me money.”
The fix isn’t to write more. It’s to write structured — attach a small, fixed tag to every session or trade that you can later group by. Prose is fine for the one weird trade that needs a story. For the pattern, you need a number.
This is also why a state tag beats a mood diary for prop-firm traders specifically: your job is to prove consistency, and consistency is a behavioral pattern. You can only see a pattern in structured data.
A 1-5 state scale you can tag every session with
Use a single scale, applied the same way every time, ideally logged before the session so the result doesn’t contaminate it. A simple version:
- 1 — Off. Tired, distracted, angry, revenge-primed. Should probably not trade.
- 2 — Shaky. Slightly rattled or rushed; discipline is thin.
- 3 — Neutral. Fine. No edge, no handicap.
- 4 — Sharp. Rested, patient, following the plan without friction.
- 5 — Locked in. Calm, decisive, zero urge to force trades.
One number, tagged to every session, is enough to start. Don’t build a fifteen-field mood taxonomy — you won’t keep it up, and the extra granularity adds noise, not signal. The discipline of the same scale every day is what makes the numbers comparable.
The second you have a state score per session, it can be joined to every trade in that session. Now a feeling has a foreign key.
Physical and situational triggers worth recording
State doesn’t come from nowhere. A handful of context tags explain most of your bad days, and they’re worth a checkbox each:
- Sleep — under your normal amount, yes/no.
- Trading after a loss — was this session opened while still stinging from the last one?
- Chasing a target — end of the evaluation, behind on the day, pressing to hit a number.
- Off-routine — traded a session you don’t normally trade, or outside your plan.
- Distraction — life stress, second screen, phone.
These are the situational fuel behind a low state score. Recording them lets you find the cause, not just the symptom. “My state-1 sessions are almost always after a loss and on short sleep” is an actionable finding. “I felt off” is not.
Correlating emotional tags with expectancy by state
This is where the structure pays off. With a state score on every trade, split your results by state and read the expectancy of each bucket:
- What’s your average R when you traded at state 4–5?
- What’s your average R at state 1–2?
For most traders the gap is stark and one-directional: the low-state sessions don’t just feel worse, they are worse — lower win rate, worse realized R, more off-plan trades. Feed each bucket’s trades through an expectancy calculator and you’ll often find your entire edge lives in your high-state sessions, while the low-state ones quietly give it back.
That’s a finding you can act on tomorrow. It reframes “manage your emotions” — vague, moralistic, useless — into “don’t trade below state 3,” which is a rule.
Dedicated journals like Edgewonk pioneered this kind of emotion tagging, and it’s genuinely valuable. The limitation is that it depends on you honestly self-scoring and manually stitching mood to results. Shibiki keeps the objective side — fills, sizing, realized R — captured automatically from the broker, so the only thing you supply is the one honest number about your head. The correlation between your state tag and your live edge health is then computed for you, per strategy.
Turning patterns into pre-session rules
Data you don’t convert into a rule is just an interesting chart. Once the state-versus-expectancy pattern is visible, write it into your pre-session checklist:
- If sleep < normal and last session was a loss → half size, or no trade.
- Self-score below 3 → observation only until it lifts.
- Chasing a number near the end of an evaluation → step away; the pressure trade is the one that fails a firm’s rules.
The goal isn’t to become a monk. It’s to make sure your worst mental states never meet your largest positions. Pair these behavioral rules with hard risk limits enforced at the broker — the kind Shibiki pushes down to the account so a state-1 impulse can’t override the size cap you set while calm — and psychology stops being a mystery. It becomes one more field in the log that pays for itself.
Related: Trading Expectancy · Expectancy Calculator · Shibiki vs Edgewonk