Hi jonboy123,
Attached is an Excel doc. that I use to record my trades. It holds 200 pages (1 for each trade) plus a 'Month', 'Week' and 'Day' page. I chose 200 as that's the most number of trades I'm likely to make in any one month. You can add more pages - or delete - as required. After I've finished trading, I enter the basic details of each trade on the 'Day' page. I've put a real life example of an actual trade from May 2008. The first column is my ref' No., the rest are all self explanatory - I think? Obviously, you can alter the headings to record the info' that matters to you. At the time, I traded U.S. stocks and ATR was important to me as it dictated my position size. Chances are, you won't want ATR, so you could either delete it or replace it with something else. If you do this, you'll need to manually update the heading in PP's 1-200. (You can do that as a group - you don't have to do it one by one!)
The Tab ref' at the left relates to the page tabs at the foot of the doc. If you click on tab 1, you'll see all the info' that I keyed into the fist row of the 'Day' page appears in tab 1. Pages 2-200 are all blank because I've not keyed any details in the linked rows 2-200 on the 'Day' page. The only info' that I add that's bespoke to each individual page is in the 'Notes' section - and to drop in the chart. All the other info' is on the 'Day' page. At the end of the week, it is easy to tally up the data in the 'Day' page and enter it into the appropriate week on the 'Week' page. At the end of the month, I use all the info' on the 'Week' page to complete the 'Month' page. As you will see, it provides a lot of telling statistics from which you can learn a great deal. One month I noted that I had a positive expectancy on short trades and a negative one on long trades. Had I only traded short that month, I'd have done really well. Based on that evidence, I knew I had to either stop trading long or examine what I was failing to do (or doing wrongly) on the long trades that I was doing well (or better, at least) on the short trades.
At the end of each month, I printy out the entire doc. (except the 'Day' page), together with the broker statements and spiral bind the whole thing into a book. Having the hard copy is useful, I find, as I look at it more often than I would at a doc. buried in the bowels of my computer. Anyway, I hope you find it useful, let me know if anything is unclear.
Tim.
NB. Both xls.doc's are the same - the old one is for anyone who doesn't have a recent copy of the program
