The broker already has entry and exit. Log the human part.
Three honest lines per trade beat a manifesto you will never reread.
Price, quantity, time and symbol arrive free in the tradebook. Everything that explains the trade has to be typed by you, and it has a short shelf life — the reason is true at the moment of entry and slowly becomes fiction afterwards.
A minimum viable trade note
Why this trade, what would prove it wrong, and whether it was part of the morning plan. Three lines. Anything longer and you will stop doing it by Thursday.
- Setup tag from a short, fixed vocabulary
- Planned stop and planned risk in rupees
- Was this in the morning plan? Yes or no
- One line: what would invalidate the idea
- A chart crop of the level you were watching
Keep the tag vocabulary tiny
If January says ORB and March says opening range, your analytics quietly split one family into two and both look weak. Ten tags, renamed rarely, will out-perform fifty precise ones.
Append, do not overwrite
The note you wrote while angry is data. Sanitising it a week later to sound composed destroys the only honest record of how the decision was made. Add a calmer addendum with its own timestamp instead.
Your broker already knows
- Symbol, price, quantity, time
- Product and order type
- Charges on the contract note
- Whether it was squared off
Only you can record
- Why you took it
- The stop you had planned
- Whether it was in the morning plan
- What would have proved you wrong
Key takeaways
- Log plan, stop, tag and one why-line.
- Keep the tag list small and stable.
- Append later reflections; never edit the original note.
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.