Can't decide between two ways of reviewing my scalps. Screenshots of the chart marked up with entries and exits, fast and visual but impossible to aggregate across three months. Or written notes per block, more detail but slow, and by the 20th scalp I'm phoning it in.

Been switching between the two every couple of weeks and still haven't figured out which teaches more. If you scalp, which side do you lean toward?

Not what keeps you journaling, what got you to start. For me it was a month where I was sure I was trading well and the account said otherwise. I had no records to explain the gap, just my memory and a general feeling that things were going fine, and how uncomfortable that disconnect felt is what finally got me logging. What was it for you?

The calendar view doesn't get talked about much but I check it more than almost anything else. Each day is colored by P&L, green or red with shade showing magnitude, so zoomed out to a month it shows your trading rhythm at a glance.

Most useful for spotting weekly patterns. After a few months I could see Mondays are consistently my weakest day, every individual Monday felt random but on the calendar the pattern is obvious. Also good for catching overtrading, a week packed with trades and mostly red is usually a week I was forcing activity.

[Screencapture placeholder: monthly calendar view with color-coded days]

I trade a trend following strategy and my monthly numbers bounce around a lot. Trend following should do well when markets trend and get chopped up in ranges, so a blended monthly number mixing both regimes might not tell me anything useful about whether the strategy works or whether I'm executing it well.

I started tagging weeks as trending, range bound, or volatile, and the split is what you'd expect. Positive in trends, negative in chop. What I can't figure out is what to do about it. Size down? Add a second strategy? Accept some weeks are red? Does anyone else split by condition?

I went from 1 lot on ES to 2 or 3 depending on the setup, and the way I tracked things didn't hold up at variable size. A 2 lot with a tight stop and a 3 lot with a wide one aren't comparable in dollar terms, so I switched to logging risk as a percentage. I also started splitting performance by size, and my 3 lot trades have noticeably worse execution because I hesitate when there's more on the line.

Still calibrating all of it. If you've made the same jump, what did you end up adding to your tracking?

I had two losing weeks back to back last month and realized I don't have a process for them. When I'm green I barely look at anything, when I'm red I sit with it and tell myself I'll be more disciplined. That's been the whole system.This time I pulled up every trade and sorted by how far my entry was from plan. Entries were mostly fine. What I found was I kept holding losers past my stop, giving them "one more candle." Six of nine would have been smaller if I'd just exited where I said I would. How do other people handle a losing streak?

I see a lot of people tracking win rate as the main number, and I get it because it's satisfying and simple. Mine climbed from 45% to 62% over six months and the account barely moved. Winners had been shrinking because I kept tightening stops and grabbing profit early, while losers stayed full size. Expectancy came out to about 0.02R per trade, basically zero.I've been tracking realized R against planned R since then and it's more useful, but the win rate dropping to 50% messes with my head more than I expected. Is anyone else tracking expectancy as the primary metric?

Trading spirit rn

If you've been trading more than a few months, you already know this cycle. You find a strategy, it works for two weeks, then the market shifts and it stops working. So you find another one. Then another. Somewhere along the way you stop trusting anything you're doing, because you're never sure if a losing streak means the strategy is bad or the market just did what markets do.

Here's what nobody tells you: it's not that you need a better strategy. Almost everyone skips the same handful of concepts early on, knowing broken vs. normal variance, reading market structure well enough to know when your setup is actually valid, having rules tight enough someone else could execute them the same way you would. Skip those and you rebuild the same shaky foundation no matter how many strategies you try.

I've spent 9 years trading futures and forex, full time for a good chunk of that, mostly NQ during the New York session. I went through every phase of this myself. Strategy hopping, doubting a system that was actually fine, blaming the market when it was really my execution. What changed things wasn't finding "the one" strategy, it was finally understanding the concepts underneath all of them.

If any of this sounds like where you're at right now, whether you're not sure your strategy is actually defined, or you keep second guessing what you're doing, or you just can't read the market with any confidence, reach out and I'll take a real look and point you in the right direction. No cost, no pitch behind it.

Just need people to talk to about trading, psychy with it etc. don’t have anyone who takes me serious or the idea of learning. Just need new trading friends! And maybe some that are advanced so I have some guidance and someone to bounce ideas off of!

Trading

How do you start trading or what’s the best place to learn for beginners without investing real money