ORB Trading Journal
Notes on the record keeping side of opening range trading: which fields a trade log needs, how to capture the setups you passed on, and how to read a week of entries back without quietly editing them.
The Log Is the Only Thing That Survives the Session
By the time the close arrives, most of what you knew during the session has gone. The outcome remains, and the outcome quietly colours everything that led up to it. A record written while the session is still running preserves the parts that do not survive on their own: what the range looked like before it broke, what you were waiting for, what made you hesitate for a minute and then act anyway. None of that is recoverable later from memory. The log is not paperwork attached to trading. Besides the money, it is the only durable output of the day.
A Field You Will Not Fill In Is Not a Field
Every field added to a log costs something at the moment it is least affordable, which is during a trade or immediately after one. A form with many boxes gets completed properly for a week and then abandoned, or worse, completed carelessly, which produces a record that looks thorough and is not. The useful test for any field is whether you would still fill it in on a dull afternoon when you have no appetite for the exercise at all. Fields that fail that test should be cut rather than defended.
The Entries With No Trade in Them
A log containing only executed trades describes a fraction of the decisions actually made. Most sessions include setups that were examined and declined, and a decline is a decision carrying the same weight as an entry. Recorded properly, those entries answer questions the trade list cannot: whether the rules were applied consistently, whether the skips clustered on a particular kind of day, whether the reason given at the time still reads as a reason a week later. Left out, the record tilts silently towards the days when something happened.
Memory Rewrites the Week Quietly
Recollection is not a neutral store. A losing trade acquires warning signs it did not visibly have at the time, and a winning one acquires a conviction that was simply absent. This happens with no intent to deceive anyone, including yourself, and it happens quickly. The value of a note written in the moment is precisely that it disagrees with the version you now hold. A review habit that tidies old entries so they match the current understanding destroys the one property that made them worth keeping in the first place.
What Gets Logged Here
The articles here stay with the mechanics of keeping the record: which fields earn their place, how to capture a decision not to trade without turning it into an essay, and how to read back a week of entries without editing them into a neater story. Questions of strategy, of entries and stops and targets, belong somewhere else and are left alone here. What gets treated is the bookkeeping, on the view that a system you cannot examine honestly after the fact is a difficult thing to improve.
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Logging the Trades You Did Not Take
Ask a trader how many decisions they made last week and the answer is usually the number of trades they placed. It is rarely the real number. Every session where a range formed and nothing was taken contained a decision, and it went unrecorded because nothing happened as a result. The absence is invisible, which is exactly what makes it worth writing down.
Two Very Different Kinds of Nothing
A skip because the rules said no and a skip because you did not feel like it produce the same blank space in the log and mean opposite things. The first is the system working. The second is the system being overridden, which is the event most worth knowing about, and it is the one that leaves no trace anywhere else in the record.
There is a third case, and it is the most awkward. The setup qualified, you intended to take it, and you were slow. A missed fill and a deliberate pass look identical at the end of the day. Separating them is most of the value of keeping these entries at all.
Keeping the Entry Short Enough to Survive
The failure mode is obvious once you have tried it. A no trade entry feels like it needs justification, so it becomes a paragraph, and writing paragraphs about things that did not happen is not sustainable past the first fortnight. The entries stop, and they stop first on the busy days, which are precisely the days worth capturing.
So the entry has to be small. A single line describing the range briefly, one category for why nothing was taken, and nothing else. The categories come from a short fixed list settled on in advance: outside the rules, inside the rules but declined, intended and missed, not at the desk. Four or five options, chosen from rather than composed, take seconds.
The fixed list matters more than the wording of any option in it. Free text cannot be counted, and counting is the entire purpose. Thirty lines of prose about days you sat out will never be read again. Thirty tagged entries can be sorted in a moment.
What These Entries Say Later
Read back over a month, the no trade log answers questions the executed trades cannot touch. If the rules rejected a great many setups and the ones they accepted did poorly, the rules are not filtering the way they were meant to. If the rejections cluster on a particular kind of session, that is a description of the strategy's real scope, arrived at from the record rather than from intention.
The declined but qualifying entries are the sharpest ones. A handful over a quarter is human. A steady stream means the written rules and the traded rules have separated, and the traded ones are the real system whether or not anyone ever wrote them down. Nothing else in a log surfaces that as plainly.
Entries for setups missed through slowness point somewhere else entirely, usually at the mechanics of the morning rather than at judgement. That is a different problem with a different fix, and it stays hidden while both kinds of blank day look the same.
The Temptation to Score Them
Once the entries exist, the obvious next move is to go back at the end of the day and mark what each skipped setup would have done. This is where the exercise usually gets ruined.
Knowing that a declined trade would have worked tells you very little about whether declining it was correct. A rule that skips a category of setup will inevitably skip some that would have won, and that is the cost of having the rule, not evidence against it. Marking outcomes on skipped trades adds a column of regret to a record that is supposed to be neutral, and regret is a poor input to the next session's decisions.
If those outcomes get recorded at all, they should be recorded in bulk and read in bulk, across a stretch long enough that the pattern rather than the instance is what you see. A single skipped setup that ran a long way is a story. A season of them, sorted by reason, is information. Build the log so the second is easy to produce and the first is hard to dwell on.
The habit costs a few seconds a day and it fills in the half of the record that otherwise stays permanently blank. A log of only the trades you took describes a trader who never says no, which is not the trader you are trying to become.
Reviewing a Week of Logs Without Rewriting History
The weekly review is where most logs quietly stop being records. You sit down with a week of entries, you now know how everything turned out, and the note written on Tuesday looks naive. The urge to correct it is strong and it feels like diligence. It is also the one thing that will make the whole archive worthless.
The Review Is Not a Second Attempt
An entry written during a session is evidence of what you believed at the time. That is its only real property. It is not a prediction to be graded and it is not a draft awaiting a better version. Once you start improving Tuesday's note with Friday's knowledge, every future review reads a set of documents that agree with each other because they were made to agree, and the disagreement between them was the useful part.
This is worth stating plainly because the alternative feels so reasonable. Nobody edits a log intending to falsify it. They edit it because the earlier version now looks incomplete, and completing it seems like an improvement rather than a loss.
Read Forwards, in the Order You Wrote
Start at Monday and read through to Friday without skipping ahead to the entries you already remember. Reading in order reproduces something of the sequence you actually lived through, which matters because the decisions were made in that sequence and not in a summary view.
Reading out of order, or reading only the losses, produces a distorted week. The losses stand out in memory already, and giving them the first pass as well doubles their weight. A week where three ordinary trades went as planned and one went badly is a week that mostly worked, and only a straight read makes that visible.
Annotations Live Somewhere Else
The practical answer to the editing urge is structural rather than a matter of willpower. The original entry stays untouched, and anything added later goes in a separate place: a second column, an appended block, a different file, whatever the tool allows, so long as it is visibly distinct from the original.
Now the honest thought can be written down at no cost. Noting that a range you described as normal was in fact the tallest of the month is a genuinely useful observation. Quietly changing the word normal to tall in the original entry is not the same act, even though it produces a document that reads better.
Date the annotations. A remark added the following Monday and one added three months later carry different weight, and after a year you will not remember which is which unless the record says so.
Look for Repetition Before Conclusions
A week is a short sample and it will not tell you whether an approach works. It can tell you whether you did the same thing more than once, and that is what a weekly read should be hunting for.
Repetition shows up in the descriptive fields rather than in the results. The same phrase appearing in three range descriptions, the same reason given for three skips, the same note about your own state before the two trades that went wrong. None of it proves anything on its own. It marks a place to watch, and over several weeks the observations that keep reappearing separate themselves from the ones that were noise.
Resist writing a verdict at the bottom. A line declaring that the week was undisciplined or that the strategy is broken becomes the headline every future reading starts from, and the entries underneath get read as support for it. Observations survive re-reading. Verdicts calcify.
Ending the Week
A review should finish with the record in a state you could hand to someone else without explanation, and with at most one or two things you intend to watch next week. Not a list of resolutions, which will not be checked, and not a rewritten philosophy.
The test of a good review is whether the log is still capable of surprising you. If reading last month's entries produces nothing but agreement with what you already think, the entries have probably been groomed into agreement over successive reviews. The uncomfortable note that contradicts your current view is the most valuable line in the file, and the whole point of the process is to still have it a year from now.
The Six Fields a Trade Log Actually Needs
Most trade logs fail in one of two directions. They capture so little that a review tells you nothing beyond a running total, or they capture so much that the whole thing quietly stops being filled in by the second week. The workable number of fields is low. The discipline is in choosing which handful of things you would genuinely want to know months from now about a session you have completely forgotten.
Description Comes Before Judgement
The first thing to settle is what kind of thing a field is. A field that asks what happened can be filled in accurately by anyone watching. A field that asks how well you traded cannot, and it will be answered differently depending on whether the trade made money. Mixing the two means the descriptive parts of the record inherit the unreliability of the evaluative parts.
So the fields below are all descriptive, with one deliberate exception at the end. Evaluation is something you do later, during a review, with the descriptions in front of you. It does not belong in the same box as the description it is judging.
Three Fields for the Setup
The first is the session context: the date, and anything unusual about the day that was known in advance. A scheduled release, a holiday session, a shortened day. This is one short line and it later explains why a run of entries looks strange.
The second is a description of the range itself. Not just the high and the low but a phrase about its shape and its height relative to what that instrument normally produces. Whether it was compressed or tall, whether price sat at one edge or moved across the middle. This is the field people most often skip and most often wish they had.
The third is what triggered, and where. Which edge, at what point in the session, and whether the break arrived quickly or after a long build. Written in a few words, this separates trades that look identical in a spreadsheet but did not resemble each other at all on the day.
Two Fields for What You Did
The fourth field is the action: direction, size, and the distance to the stop. Distance rather than price, because a stop measured as a distance is comparable across sessions while a raw price level tells you nothing once the instrument has moved on.
The fifth is how the position ended relative to the plan you held when you entered. Not the money. Whether the stop was hit as intended, whether the target was reached, whether you exited early, whether you moved something mid trade. This is the single field that most reliably reveals a gap between the system as written and the system as actually traded, and it costs a few words.
The Sixth Field Is About You
The last one is a short note on your own state before the trade. Rested or not, distracted or not, coming off a run of losses or a run of wins. It is the one subjective field on the list, and it earns its place because it is the only variable that changes daily, affects the outcome, and appears nowhere in the market data.
Keep it to a word or two drawn from a small vocabulary you reuse. Free text here turns into a diary, and a diary does not sort. The point is to be able to look back over a month and notice that a particular category of entry keeps appearing alongside a particular kind of mistake.
What Is Deliberately Missing
The result in money is not on the list, because the broker already records it perfectly and you will not improve on that. Duplicating it into the log adds nothing and does real harm, since a visible profit or loss sitting at the top of an entry shapes every other word written underneath it.
Screenshots are also absent. They are occasionally useful and impossible to search, and the moment capturing one becomes part of the routine the routine becomes heavy. A written description of the range forces you to articulate what you saw, which is worth more than an image you will never open again.
Six is not a sacred number and a seventh field may be right for a particular way of trading. The constraint that matters is that the whole entry should be completable in the time between closing a position and the next thing demanding attention, because a log completed late is a log written from memory, and memory is exactly the thing the log exists to replace.
