How to journal futures trades (a simple, repeatable routine)
By Santiago Álvarez Osuca ·
A trading journal only pays off if you actually keep it. Here's a routine that's fast enough to survive a live session and honest enough to change how you trade.
Why journal futures trades at all
Your broker statement tells you what happened to your money. It doesn't tell you why — which setups pay, which hours cost you, or whether following your own rules is worth it. A journal turns a pile of fills into those answers. For futures specifically, where a few oversized ticks can undo a good week, the point isn't to relive every trade; it's to see the pattern you can't feel in the moment.
What to log on every trade
Keep the per-trade record short enough that you'll do it every time. The essentials:
- Instrument and direction. ES long, NQ short, and so on.
- Entry, exit, size, and time. Enough to reconstruct the trade and its P&L.
- The setup. Which playbook this was — or, honestly, that it wasn't one.
- Rules followed. Tick the rules you actually kept: your stop, your size cap, your session window.
- A one-line note. What you saw, and how you felt taking it. A chart screenshot helps.
That last two are what separate a journal from a spreadsheet of fills. The point of a futures journal is discipline, and discipline only becomes visible when you record whether you kept your own rules.
The five-minute end-of-day review
Do this once, after the close, while it's fresh:
- Read back the day's trades and mark the ones that followed your plan versus the ones that didn't.
- Find the single worst decision — usually one trade, not the whole day.
- Write one sentence on what set it off: a red open, a chased entry, a number you wanted back.
- Give yourself an honest discipline score for the session, separate from whether you made money.
A green day where you broke your rules is a warning, not a win. Scoring discipline apart from P&L is the habit that catches it.
The few numbers worth watching
Once you have a few weeks logged, resist the urge to stare at everything. A short list does the work: win rate, profit factor, expectancy, and average R, plus your rule-adherence rate and your worst hour of the day. Those six tell you what pays, what leaks, and where the discipline work is.
Common mistakes
- Only logging winners, or only losers. The edge is in the full record.
- Journaling P&L but never rules. You'll chart your account and never find the cause.
- Making it a chore. If a trade takes minutes to log, you'll stop within a week.
How Wickary helps
Wickary is built around exactly this routine. It's made for futures and forex, it scores how well you followed your own playbook, and it computes the numbers above for you across one account or several. You can start free — one account, up to 50 trades, playbooks, and the daily journal, with no card to sign up.
Related: the trading journal overview · what is trailing drawdown?