Paper trading is always a great way to start your career as a trader. It will get your feet wet enough to understand the dynamics of trading.

To better optimize your paper trading, you will need to keep track of your performance by continuing to add your executions to a paper trade journal. This journal could be a simple notebook to get you started, or you could go beyond and create a simple excel sheet. It is your call, whatever you feel the most comfortable with. We recommend using our paper trade journal (of course) because it takes your mind away from “How to keep a paper trade journal”, instead you let our software do the heavy lifting and you just can focus on journaling your paper trades.

What to record in a paper trade journal?

It all depends on whether you are trading Stocks, Options, Futures or Forex. Each market will require slightly different data for you ot journal. being that said, here is the common information among those market that at the very least you should be recording.

• Entry Price and DateTime
• Exit Price and DateTime
• Position Size
• Reason why you took the trade

These four points of information will go a long way to help you shape in the proper direction when starting your trading career and it will also help you build a habit of journaling your paper trades. This habit will be worth gold once you step over to trade with a real account and money of your own pocket.

What does a paper trade journal sample look like?

In the sample below you can see this person is trading stocks but the same principle applies to options, futures, and forex. As you can see you should record the four basic points we talked above in a very simple and plain English. There is no magic here, the idea behind writing what happened is for you to take into account into future trades potential mistakes or opportunities.

How does your application TraderSync look like to record my paper trade journal?

TraderSync provides you a lot more information such as your profit and losses. All you need to do is to provide us the basic data such as entry and exit points and we will calculate the rest for you. The idea of using our application tas paper trade journal is for you to gain all the benefits from understanding your performance.

Profitly (profit.ly) is a great tool to make yourself responsible for your own actions, in terms that your trades will be automatically verified. They have some very basic analytics tools that will provide you with some insights into your trading. Their focus is to build a community of transparent traders that share their trading ideas. I support their vision as I think we need more transparency in the industry.

However, Profitly is not a trading journal. Plenty of people confuse the fact that profitly import your trades and believe this counts as journaling trades. This is an important concept to understand. If you were like me, you were thinking you do not have to journal your trades in a notebook or in excel as profitly was tracking your trades for you. However, the fact that it does track your trades and automatically logs them in, does not mean it is helping you understand what is really going on with your trading edge. If you do not take trade journaling into your own hands you are not thinking back to why is it that you took the trade.

This is why you need a stock trading journal application such as TraderSync. This in conjunction with profitly will provide you with the support that you need while trading the market. I used this to help build responsibility of my actions as all my trades were public, while I use TraderSync to journal my trades and my thoughts around each one to help me understand why I take a good or a bad trade, to help me find my edge and know what to focus on.