The One Thing All Successful Traders Do

Separate yourself from the average retail investor in 2021

Shashank Vemuri
5 min readJan 6, 2021

As we roll into 2021 and the new trading year, it’s important to reflect on the trades we made in the past year. With the S&P 500 and Nasdaq up nearly 70% and 87% from their March lows, respectively, it is very easy to be complacent with one’s trading rules. A quick way to ensure you stay strict with your rules and learn from every trade is to create and document your trades in a trading journal, just like the most successful traders of all time do.

From scalpers to long-term investors and everyone in between, trading journals have been quoted repeatedly as one of the fundamental factors in the best professional investors' outstanding returns. So without further ado, let’s dive into the four reasons trading journals are vital to any trading strategy!

Photo by Michael Longmire on Unsplash

Why are trading journals so important?

1. Trading Journals provide invaluable performance metrics

Depending on where and how you document your trades, a journal can provide important summary data on your performance, such as profit-to-loss ratio, risk-to-reward ratio, and average gains. While not indicative of future results, these metrics can indicate which trading…

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Shashank Vemuri

Hey! I’m Shashank Vemuri, a software engineer, stock trader, and entrepreneur.