Electronic Trade Journal Instruction Guide

The purpose of this program is to place all of your trading decisions into a relational database, which will help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your trading and help you to become a better trader. Written journals can work as well, but extracting patterns and reports from them can be tedious and time consuming. With the Electronic Trading Journal you can quickly and accurately sort through your trades to identify setups or times of day that may be hurting or enhancing your trading results. The Electronic Trading Journal (ETJ) has customizable fields for the trader to define for his or her own style of trading, so whatever the trader desires to monitor and track can later be analyzed with detailed reports to provide insight and opportunity for improvement.

The ETJ can also dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to record a trading journal each day by taking a snapshot of your desktop (and thus your charts) each time you enter or exit a position. Multiple snapshots are taken for partial exits or entries; so every trade you make is recorded as it happens. It is no longer necessary to scroll back in time with your charting program to remember what you were thinking at that point in time, because a snapshot has already been taken of that point in time when you made your trading decision.

Here are some guidelines for the basic functions of the program:

Trade Entry:

1. Enter the symbol of the symbol of the stock you wish to trace
2. Enter the number of shares you are tracking
3. Enter the price upon entry
4. Enter your stop price
5. Enter the current date which can be chosen with the small button above and at the right of the date space
6. Enter the time of day which can be chosen in this manner as well with the button above and to the right.
7. Enter short or long by selecting the correct radio button
8. Click Enter

When you click enter a screenshot of your desktop is automatically taken of what you were looking at when you came to this trading decision. Please note that if you are using multiple monitors, the snapshot will be taken of only your primary Windows desktop, so make sure your charts are set up accordingly. You will want your most important timeframes and charts to be on your primary windows desktop so you can review exactly what was happening with that trade in multiple timeframes when the screenshot was taken. No other monitors will be visible in the snapshot so do some thinking on what you want captured each time you track a trade in the ETJ.

Reviewing Open Positions:

1. Single Click the Open Trades folder on the main ETJ toolbar (directly to the right of the enter button), and find the trade you had listed.
2. Open the details of the trade by clicking on the ID number of the trade. Now you will see your trade details.

Closing or Adding to Open Positions:

1. Single Click to the open trades folder on the main ETJ toolbar (directly to the right of the enter button), and find the trade you had listed.
2. Enter the number of shares you want to add or close in the +/- field (don’t worry about using a + or – sign in front of the number, the program knows what to do automatically depending on whether you designated the trade as a long or short)
3. Type in your price
4. Click on “add” or “close” in the trade row line. Make sure you click the correct one. (a snapshot will now be taken and if you closed a position the trade will disappear from the Trade History window because it is now closed)

Reviewing Your Trade History:

1. Single Click the History Trades folder on the main ETJ toolbar (directly to the right of the Open Positions button)
2. Hit the refresh button (the blue circular icon) to populate the close position table if the trade you know you closed is not listed in the table, it should appear now.
3. Click on the ID number of the trade you wish to see the details and screenshots of. There will be a different tab for each action taken and the tab will be labeled with the price at which you made that decision.
4. Once you have the Trade Details screen up, you can move through your trades by clicking the left and right arrow buttons << < > >>. These are buttons on the actual screen not the keyboard arrows.
   • This is a fast way to edit information about each trade and to scan through your trade history

Exporting Screenshots for Markup:

1. In the Trade Details screen, you will see two image icons (yellow with a mountain on it), each with an arrow pointing up or down.
2. Click on the image icon with the down arrow to export
3. Save I as a .bmp file anywhere you like
4. Now open your image editing program by clicking on the file itself or opening the program and navigating to the file
5. Mark up the file as you like and Save it, now you must import it back into the ETJ

Importing Marked Up Screenshots Back Into the ETJ:

1. In the Trade Details screen, you will see two image icons (yellow with a mountain on it), each with an arrow pointing up or down.
2. Click on the image icon with the up arrow to import
3. Navigate to the edited image you want to import
4. Save
5. Now that edited image should be associated with the correct trade and you now have a marked up image better describing your thoughts with visual markers and possibly comments on the charts.

Customizing the Fields and Drop-Down Menus in the Trade Details Screen:

1. Right Click anywhere on the ETJ toolbar where there is no button already and select Properties from the menu or click Properties from the main bar
2. Click on the Categoriestab
3. Enter Categories you wish to track
4. Now enter the options for each category by clicking on the small … button above each new category you have created.

Field customization is hugely useful because now you can track things you wish to that are not already in the program. Some ideas for categories are:

• Was my Trade Plan followed?
  • Yes and No as options to select in drop down menu
• Did I obey my stop if it was hit?
  • Yes and No as options to select in drop down menu
• Entry Grade
  • Scale of 1-10 in drop down menu in half point increments
• Exit Grade
  • Scale of 1-10 in drop down menu in half point increments
• Setup Type
  • Bull flag
  • Avalanche
  • Breakout over 5 min base
  • Bear Trap
  • Etc.

Now you can see that after a couple hundred trades, you might start noticing patterns such as Bear Traps hitting your stops more often than any other setup type (since P&L is automatically tracked), or your best trades were when you gave yourself a good entry score. You may find that your exit scores are higher with your best trades, etc. It’s up to you to think of what you want to track in your trading, but whatever you choose you’ll be able to sort by it in the reporting area of the program within the Closed Positions window. Who knows, you may even find that you make money when you don’t follow your trade plan, but you’ll never find out unless you track it as a customized field.

Trade Details Screen General Comments:
Click on the ID Number for the trade of interest in the Trade History area. Here you see the symbol for the stock, whether it was long or short, along with the trade type and method. You will also see the date and time for this trade as well, in addition to any customized fields you have created in the Properties areaas described above and the amount of shares you had when you opened it. At the top of every trade recap is listed the trade Id number. The symbol of the stock, whether it was a long or short trade, the trade method used, the net profit, and the percentage of gain with each trade.

Below the trade date there is an area available for you to make quick notes as to why you chose this trade and what the thought process was behind it, or any other notes for this trade. Right below this notation space is the screen shot of exactly what was on your screen at the time you chose your trade. If making a notation to this trade you enter the information in the note area and when finished hit the save disk button to the right and above the notation area and next to the screen shot scaling. Be sure to save before moving to another trade of viewing a separate tab otherwise you will lose your changes.

The Risk / Reward Calculator:
The next thing on your tool bar next to the history folder is your risk/reward calculator. The first thing you enter here is the account size. You also need to enter the trade type whether it be long or short along with the entry price and your stop price, and you targets for this stock.

The Stock Calculator:
Next on your tool bar is your support and calculator. Which is shown with a calculator icon. To use this you enter the previous day low, the previous day's high, and the previous day's close. Once you have entered this information it will give you the average, first resistance, second resistance, first support, and second support for the day.

Closing the Program:
When you are through trading for the day you go to the last icon on the tool bar and click on it. This closes the program for you. All the screen shots and information are saved for you. Your open trades are still in your open trades folder and your previous days trades are still listed in the history folder.

General Tips:
1. Save often! Especially if you make changes in different tabs within a single trade in the Closed Positions area of the program. Get in the habit of saving new information added about a trade in each tab before switching tabs.

2. If you use another program to mark up your charts with lines and comments, make that program the default program for the .bmp file format since all screenshots in the ETJ are automatically captured in .bmp format. That way when you export the image from the ETJ for editing, you will automatically open your image editing program when you open that exported file. It saves time as opposed to navigating to the file from the program itself. Microsoft Paint works just fine for editing if you choose to do that.