Journaling: The Boring Homework You Refuse to Do (And Why Your Account Will Die Because of It)

Listen, I’m going to be straight with you. I’ve been in this game for seventeen years. I’ve made seven figures and I’ve been down to my last £3,000 wondering if I should’ve just become an accountant like my mum suggested. And you know what separates the two versions of me? A leather-bound notebook and the discipline to fill the bloody thing out.

But let’s be honest—you’re not going to do it. You’re reading this right now thinking, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll start journaling tomorrow,” and we both know that’s bollocks. By Thursday you’ll be too busy chasing that GBP/USD move to bother writing down what went wrong with your last three trades. By next week, you’ll have completely forgotten why you took that EURUSD position at 1.0850 in the first place.

So why am I even bothering to write this?

Because I’m tired. I’m tired of watching intelligent people—genuinely clever people—blow £5,000 accounts like they’re playing with Monopoly money. I’m tired of the same excuses. And I’m tired of traders who can recite Fibonacci ratios but can’t explain why they just lost 40% of their capital in a month.

The Fantasy vs. The Reality

Here’s what you think trading is: You wake up, check the economic calendar on your forex calculator, identify a clean support level, place a trade with perfect risk management, and watch the market validate your superior analysis. You repeat this three times, make £400, and spend the afternoon at Shoreditch House.

Here’s what trading actually is: You wake up, ignore the calendar, see a “promising” setup, ignore your predetermined stop loss, add to a losing position because you’re “averaging down” (which is code for “I’m emotionally attached to being right”), panic-sell at the worst possible moment, and then convince yourself the move you exited was just “market noise.”

And then—this is the important bit—you do absolutely nothing to understand what just happened. You don’t write it down. You don’t review it. You don’t even think about it. You just reload your deposit and pray to the Forex Gods that next Tuesday is different.

It isn’t. It never is.

Why Journaling Terrifies You

Let’s cut through the nonsense. You don’t journal because journaling requires you to admit things you don’t want to admit:

You’re not as good at this as you think you are. That “winning setup” you keep talking about? Your journal will show it wins 45% of the time. That’s not an edge. That’s a coin flip with worse odds.
You’re not actually following your plan. You tell yourself you have a “plan.” You probably do. It’s probably decent. But your journal will reveal that you’ve broken it 78% of the time. You know what that means? You don’t have a plan. You have a fantasy.
Your emotions are running the show. Most traders journal their entries and exits. Better traders journal their feelings. And that’s where it gets painful. You’ll see the same emotional pattern over and over: FOMO gets you in, fear gets you out, revenge trading costs you £600.
You’re taking bigger risks than you think. Your forex calculator tells you exactly what your risk-to-reward ratio is. But your journal reveals the true risk—the one where you moved your stop loss, added to the position, or ignored your maximum daily loss limit. That’s when you discover you were actually risking 3% when you thought you were risking 1%.

The Uncomfortable Truth

I have a client—let’s call him Marcus—who came to me after losing £12,000 in eight weeks. He was furious at the “market” for being rigged. When I asked to see his trading journal, he went quiet. Turns out, he didn’t have one.

I made him do something radical: I made him journal his next 50 trades. Every entry, every exit, every feeling, every reason for breaking his rules.

Want to know what he found? He was profitable on his setups. Genuinely profitable. His win rate was 54%, his average winner was £240, and his average loser was £180. That should print money. But he was losing because—and I’m not making this up—he was taking four times more trades on Fridays after three glasses of wine at lunch.

Marcus is now profitable. Not because his strategy changed. Because he saw himself.

That’s what journaling does. It holds up a mirror that you don’t want to look in.

The Boring But Brilliant Solution

Here’s the minimal viable journal. I’m not asking you to write poetry. I’m asking you to answer five questions for every trade:

Why did I take this trade? (Reference your setup, the time, the context)
What was my plan? (Entry, stop loss, target)
What actually happened? (Did you stick to the plan?)
How did I feel? (Be honest. Greedy? Scared? Revenge trading?)
What’s the lesson? (Don’t say “don’t lose money.” That’s meaningless.)

That’s it. Five questions. Takes sixty seconds per trade.

Every Sunday, spend thirty minutes looking back at the week. Find patterns. Look for your emotional triggers. See where your forex calculator was right and where you ignored it.

The Kicker

You know what the most profitable traders I know have in common? Not the fanciest software. Not the biggest monitors. Not the best economic calendar setup.

They have dusty, worn-out notebooks that they actually use.

I have seven years’ worth. They’re sitting on a shelf above my desk, and I still flip through them. I still see my own patterns. I still learn.

So here’s the deal: You can either journal, find your leaks, fix them, and become consistently profitable. Or you can keep doing what you’re doing, wondering why your account balance looks like a sinking ship, and blaming the market.

The calculator doesn’t make the decision. You do.

Now go get a notebook. Not tomorrow. Today.

This is the part where you close the browser and don’t do it anyway. I know you will. They always do.