Build Your Trading Skills With This Trading Journal Spreadsheet for Excel!

As traders are continuously focused on trading skills building to either maintain or better their trading performance, they need tools to keep score of their results.  

That is where a trading ledger is useful.

Ledgers have been created in many format based on the purpose and end goal we have for them.  

The most common we know of how they are used is for bookkeeping for accounting purposes.   In this case credits and debits in the form of trading gains or losses along with trading expenses like commissions, swaps and other trading expenses are entered in a progressive way throughout the course of one year. It provides a global view of an accounts performance by summing up the total gain or loss of the trading activity on a continuous basis.  Although this is useful information, it could be difficult to identify the source of an unwanted result because it is like a sea of numbers that one would need to sift through to hopefully isolate the cause.

Trade journaling in a ledger is very useful as we start reviewing what we did in a more detailed way.  And there is a way to really get to the source of behaviors when we know how to setup the collection of statistical data for the purpose we are aiming for.  In trading, we can only correct the trading mistakes we keep on repeating once we know what they are.   And this is exactly what we did here with this Trading Skills Builder.  We designed a trade ledger for the sole purpose of identifying what our trading mistakes are, after which the trader can correct them and work toward improved performance.

Using this ledger in a simple four step system truly identifies the areas for the trader to focus improvement actions and naturally lead to improved performance.

Here is a brief overview of what is involved.