Stock Trading Journal: Know Which Setups Pay
Stock traders have a data advantage: clean tickers, clear fills, and (usually) fewer trades per day than forex scalpers. That makes a stock trading journal quick to keep and unusually revealing — especially about which tickers and setups actually pay you.
Logging a stock trade properly
In AlphaTrades, choose Stocks as the instrument type and enter the ticker (AAPL, NVDA, TSLA…), number of shares, entry and exit price, and — the part most traders skip — fees and commissions. The app computes gross and net profit, and net is the number that matters: a scalping strategy that looks profitable gross can be a loser after costs, and only a journal that tracks fees will tell you.
Too busy to type during market hours? Say it — "bought 100 Apple at 190, sold at 192.50" — and AI voice entry fills the form, or screenshot your broker confirmation for AI image analysis.
Tag the setup, not just the ticker
"I trade breakouts and earnings plays" is a claim; your setup/strategy field turns it into a measurable fact. After 20–30 trades, filtering results by setup shows which strategy earns and which one just feels exciting. Most traders find they have one setup worth doubling down on and one worth deleting.
Read your per-ticker distribution
The traded-assets view in AlphaTrades shows allocation and PnL distribution per symbol. Typical discoveries:
- A "favourite" ticker you trade constantly with roughly break-even results — pure entertainment, paid for in commissions.
- A ticker you trade rarely but profitably — a candidate for more attention and size.
- One outlier loss (check best/worst trade) that explains half the month's drawdown — usually a risk-management lesson, not a stock-picking one.
The monthly stock review
- Open monthly analytics: win rate, key stats, average result.
- Rank tickers by net PnL; cut or shrink the bottom of the list.
- Compare long vs. short stats if you short.
- Check best and worst trades and write one rule from each.
AlphaTrades is free on the App Store and takes minutes to set up. Log this week's trades and your first per-ticker report is one tap away.
