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.