A trading journal that only records what you made and lost is a receipt, not a journal. The fields you skip are exactly the ones that would tell you whether your edge is real or you’ve just been lucky.
Prop-firm traders live and die by consistency, and consistency is impossible to prove without data. If you can’t answer “which setup makes me money and which one bleeds me,” you don’t have a strategy — you have a habit. Here is what actually belongs in each trade entry, and why.
The non-negotiables
These are the fields without which nothing downstream computes. Miss one and half your review becomes guesswork.
- Instrument — the exact symbol (ES, NQ, EURUSD). “Indices” is not an instrument.
- Direction — long or short. You will find you’re far better at one than the other.
- Entry price — where you actually filled, not where you wanted to.
- Exit price — the real fill, including slippage.
- Stop price — where your stop was placed at entry, not where it ended up after you moved it.
- Position size — contracts or lots. This is what converts price movement into money and risk.
- Timestamp — entry and exit, with the session (London, NY open, etc.).
From just these seven you can reconstruct dollar P&L, risk taken, and — critically — the R-multiple of the trade. Everything richer builds on this base.
If you’re logging by hand, this is also the layer most prone to error and fatigue. Shibiki captures these fields automatically from the broker fill, so the objective numbers are never wrong or missing — you spend your attention on the fields a machine can’t fill in for you.
The fields most traders skip (and regret)
The non-negotiables tell you what happened. These tell you why, and they’re the ones people drop first because they take a few seconds of honesty.
- Setup tag — a short, controlled label from a fixed list (
ORB,pullback-to-VWAP,failed-breakout). Free-typing a new name every time makes grouping impossible later. - Planned R — the reward-to-risk you were actually aiming for when you entered, e.g. 2R. This is the single most valuable field almost nobody records.
- Emotional / state tag — a one-word or 1–5 read on where your head was. More on this in the psychology guide, but even a crude tag surfaces patterns.
- Trigger — the specific condition that put you in. “Price came back and held the level” beats “looked good.”
- Was it in-plan? — a simple yes/no on whether the trade matched your rules. Off-plan winners are the most dangerous trades you take.
The setup tag and planned R are what let you slice the journal into groups and ask which ones earn. Without a consistent tag, you have one undifferentiated blob of trades and no way to fire your worst setup.
Result fields that let you compute expectancy later
Recording outcomes in a way you can do math on is the whole point. Two derived fields matter most:
- Realized R — actual profit or loss divided by the risk you took. A trade that made 1.5× what you risked is +1.5R, full stop, regardless of account size.
- Outcome class — win / loss / breakeven / scratch, so you can read win rate cleanly.
Once every trade carries a realized R, expectancy falls straight out of the log: average R per trade across your sample. You can run your numbers through an expectancy calculator to see whether the system is a net winner before you scale it on a funded account.
The reason to store results in R rather than dollars is that dollars lie across different account sizes and prop challenges. A deeper treatment lives in the R-multiple explainer, but the short version: R makes a trade on a $50k evaluation directly comparable to the same setup on a $150k funded account.
Free-text vs structured: what belongs in each
The mistake is putting everything in a notes box, or nothing. Split the difference deliberately.
| Field type | Use for | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Structured (dropdowns, numbers, tags) | Anything you’ll want to filter, group, or average | setup tag, planned R, direction, state score, in-plan yes/no |
| Free text | Context that’s unique to this one trade | “News spike at 8:30 I hadn’t accounted for,” “moved stop out of fear” |
Rule of thumb: if you’d ever want to sort or count by it, make it structured. Free text is for the story, not the statistics. A journal that’s all prose reads nicely and teaches you nothing at scale.
Why logging the plan matters as much as the outcome
Here’s the shift that separates a journal from a diary: record intent, not just result. When you log the planned stop, planned R, and the trigger before or at entry, your review stops being a hindsight exercise. You can compare what you meant to do against what you did.
That gap is where all the real feedback lives:
- Planned 2R, took profit at 0.8R? You have an early-exit problem, not a strategy problem.
- Stop planned at the structure low, but realized R shows you were stopped tighter? You moved it.
- In-plan trades average +0.4R, off-plan trades average −0.9R? Your rules already work — your discipline doesn’t.
None of those insights exist if the journal only knows the outcome. Logging the plan is what turns a pile of trades into a system you can actually diagnose — and it’s the raw material Shibiki uses to score each strategy’s live edge health, so you see a setup decaying while the sample is still small enough to act on.
Related: R-Multiple explained · Trading Expectancy · Expectancy Calculator