Ten minutes, every day you trade

About ten minutes after the close is enough for a daily trading journal, as long as the trades import themselves. Add one longer session at the end of each week.

The trouble with longer routines is the days they get skipped. A forty-minute journal gets done on green days, when you feel like reliving them. On red days you close the laptop. Those are the days with the most to teach.

Typing is what makes it long. Copying prices, times and quantities out of a broker statement eats most of the time. None of it teaches you anything.

So the goal is to cut the typing to nothing and spend the minutes on judgment. What did you mean to do, and what did you actually do?

Here's the arithmetic for a trader taking 15 trades a day. Typing each one by hand takes about 2 minutes, so the log alone runs 30 minutes a day. Over a five-day week that's 150 minutes, before you've reviewed a single decision.

Now import the trades instead. Ten minutes a day for five days is 50 minutes. Add one 30-minute weekly session and the total is 80 minutes.

That saves 70 minutes a week. And all 80 of the remaining minutes go into looking at decisions, which is what a journal is for.

Your own numbers will differ. Count your trades and time one manual entry to see the gap for yourself. If you take three trades a day, the typing cost is small and the case for imports is weaker. The ten-minute target still holds.

Spend the first two minutes checking that the day's fills came in and looking at the day's P&L. Don't start judging yet.

Use the next three minutes on two replays: the biggest loser and the biggest winner. Look at where you got in against the level you meant to trade. Look at where you got out.

Then write the day's entry in about three minutes. One entry covers the whole day. Say what you meant to do and what you actually did. Add one thing to repeat or drop.

Finish with two minutes on your daily checklist. Score yourself honestly on whether you followed it, trade results aside. A day where you lost money but followed every rule is a good day in this column.

Once a week, give it about 30 minutes. Friday after the close works, or Saturday morning if Friday ran long.

Start with the week's report card and your checklist scores. Then look at the slower numbers that need more than one day of trades. Compare trades after a loss with trades after a win, and check whether a losing habit showed up again.

Pick one change for next week. Only one, because two changes at once make it impossible to tell which one helped. Write it at the top of Monday's entry so you see it before the open.

Next Friday, check that one change before anything else. If you kept it, decide whether it helped. If you didn't, work out why before adding anything new.

Stop re-typing anything a statement already holds. Prices, times and sizes are data, and data should arrive by import.

Skip the market commentary and the per-trade essays. A paragraph on what the market did reads well and changes nothing about your next trade. Fifteen paragraphs a day is the fastest way to quit. Write about the day and replay the trades that matter.

Keep what numbers can't show. Write down the hesitation before a good entry, or the reason you moved your stop. A statement will never record either.

On a quiet day, one line is enough. On a no-trade day, write one line about why you sat out. Those lines matter later, when you check whether sitting out was the right call.

Tie the journal to the close, not to when you feel like it. Within an hour of the bell, the day is still fresh and your excuses haven't set yet.

Set a timer for ten minutes. When it rings, stop, even mid-sentence. A routine that sometimes runs to forty minutes starts to feel like forty minutes every day.

Missed a day? Don't backfill it with a long catch-up session. Write one line for the missed day and do tonight's ten minutes as normal.

After a month, look at the weekly sessions together. You'll see the same one or two problems repeat, and that's where the next month's rule comes from. Start tonight. Set the timer, check the fills, replay two trades and write one entry.