A daily journal that turns into data
Most trading journals have a notes box. You write "felt rushed today, chased the open" and move on. Six months later you have two hundred paragraphs of genuine self-knowledge and absolutely no way to see a pattern in them.
Free text is where insight goes to be forgotten. Not because it's wrong — because it can't be counted.
Write the questions once
The daily journal is built around a master list of questions you write yourself. Six or seven is typical:
- Did I follow my entry rules today?
- Did I take any trade that wasn't on my watchlist?
- Rate your discipline today (1–5)
- Rate your focus today (1–5)
- What did the market tell me that I ignored?
They're yours. Add, reword, reorder, retire — the same editable master list model as setups and mistakes. Each evening you answer them, and below that there's a free-form box for whatever doesn't fit.
The part that matters: questions have types
Every question declares what kind of answer it takes:
| Type | Answer | What a month of it becomes |
|---|---|---|
| YESNO | Two buttons | A percentage — "I followed my rules on 71% of days" |
| RATING | 1–5 dots | A trend line you can chart against daily P&L |
| TEXT | Free writing | Searchable history for the things that need words |
This is the one decision in the whole feature that can't be retrofitted. A month of free text can never become a score — the information was never captured in a countable form. But a month of ratings is immediately a chart, sitting date-for-date alongside your P&L calendar.
Which makes a question answerable that most traders can only guess at: do my low-discipline days actually cost me money? Not "I feel like they do" — a correlation you can see.
Questions have a frequency
Some questions belong to every day. Others are weekly — "did I review my open positions against the plan?" — and asking them daily just trains you to skip the form.
So each question carries DAILY, WEEKLY or MONTHLY, and only appears when it's due. Your Sunday review lives in the same system without nagging you on Tuesday.
Rewording never rewrites history
A design rule worth stating explicitly. When you answer a question, the app stores the wording as it was that day, alongside the answer.
Change "Did I follow my rules?" to "Did I follow my entry checklist?" next March, and every past answer still shows the question you actually answered. Without this, a small edit silently rewrites what four months of entries appear to mean.
This is deliberately the opposite of how setups work. Rename a setup and every trade follows, because there the ID is the identity. Here the wording is part of the record.
Separate from your trades, on purpose
The daily journal is global — it isn't attached to a portfolio, and it isn't attached to a trade. It's about the person, not the position.
Some of your most important days have no trades at all. The day you sat on your hands during a chop and didn't force anything is a day worth recording, and a trade-attached note has nowhere to put it.
What it costs you
About ninety seconds after the close. Five buttons, two ratings, a sentence if you have one.
The value doesn't come from any single entry. It comes from the fortieth, when the trend line makes a pattern visible that you'd have sworn wasn't there.