Log the mood before the P&L contaminates it

Capture the baseline first

A single pre-market field on a short scale — calm, neutral, anxious, confident, excited, angry — takes five seconds and is the only version of the answer that has not been contaminated.

A post-session field is fine as a second column. It is not a substitute.

• Same short scale every day, no free-form moods
• Filled before the first fill, not after the close
• Second, separate field for post-session reflection
• Sample size shown on every emotion-versus-P&L chart

Be humble about the correlations

Forty sessions grouped into six emotional states leaves very few observations per bucket. Interesting as a prompt to go read the notes; not sturdy enough to become a rule, and definitely not something a product should print as advice.

These are trader labels, not clinical ones

Tilt, FOMO and revenge are convenient shorthand for patterns in a book. They are not diagnoses, and a journal is not a substitute for actual help if trading is affecting your health.

Pre-session state

• Filled before the first fill
• Independent of the result
• Can be correlated with outcomes
• Five seconds on the morning card

Post-session state

• Filled after the P&L is known
• Largely a reaction to the number
• Useful as reflection, not as a variable
• Keep it in a separate column

Key takeaways

• Record the pre-session state; keep post-session separate.
• Use one short scale and never change it mid-year.
• Print sample size on every emotional correlation.

Not advice, not a call. NiyataBook is a personal trading journal, not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst. Everything above looks backwards at trades that already closed. What happened in a book does not promise what happens next, and F&O can take a year’s savings in a week.