The Edgewonk Sessions feature is the perfect synergy between statistics-based journaling and psychological journaling. The Sessions sheet helps traders make their journaling much more effective by offering a place that allows you to perform your daily, weekly or monthly review with one easy to handle feature.
Performance review – The professional feedback loop
At the end of each trading day (for day traders), week, month, or quarter you can come to your Sessions sheet and make a new entry, capture your thoughts, record your ideas and also write down the lessons that you have learned over the duration of the session.
One of the reasons why traders struggle and don’t achieve the level of success they are after is because they lack a professional and structured feedback loop. Most traders don’t record their trades, even fewer record what their trading has taught them and very few have a repeatable and organized way of keeping track of their trading. Not only the top traders, but most high-achievers are typically well organized and follow routines that allow them to develop superior skills and make constant improvements based on their observations.
Creating a new session takes a few minutes, at the most, but the insights you get over time are invaluable. You can keep track of your progress as a trader and you can come back to your sessions at the beginning of each trading day/week to remind yourself of where you are with your trading.
Creating a new session
Step 1: Choose the date and session duration
In the first column, you need to enter the starting date of your session. Every Friday or Saturday, you can come to the Sessions sheet, enter the previous Monday and select “Weekly” from the duration dropdown in the next column.
Step 2: Enter your personal observations and notes
Under “Notes”, you can type in general comments, things that described your session, and other personal thoughts you want to record.
Under “Lessons learned” you can write down the things that really stood out in your trading, mistakes that cost you the most money, new observations that you made and want to remember and general lessons about your trading.
The column “Note category” allows you to define the type of the lesson learned and organize your sessions in any other way. Under “Definitions” you can change the categories if you want to use your own.
The “Rate my sessions” column allows you to rate your session based on how satisfied you are with your trading.
Step 3: Performance statistics
The performance statistics update automatically based on the session start date and the duration you have chosen. Besides some general performance metrics, Edgewonk also shows you a range for the trade IDs of that session so that you can review individual trades much faster if necessary.
Performance review and emotional journaling
Edgewonk’s session feature pulls the plug on keeping lose paper stacks and allows traders to organize their trading in a structured way. Furthermore, by exposing yourself to your trading activity you gain a new level of self-awareness and are more likely to notice and avoid bad trading behavior and negative patterns.