For today’s tutorial, I want to show you how you can keep a digital record of your trading while still enjoying the freedom that comes with writing a journal with pen and paper. I’m going to walk you through step-by-step how to turn a Rocketbook into a day-trading journal you can use every time you have a trading session.

I’ll be transparent and say that I am an affiliate of Rocketbook, but I want you to know that they didn’t ask me – I asked them to become an affiliate because I absolutely love my Rocketbook and I want to help others find convenient ways to use it in their day trading, as well. All good?

Let’s Dive in!

What is Rocketbook?

First, what is a Rocketbook? Some of you might not be familiar with Rocketbook.

The company launched a little over five years ago and came out with an early version of a notebook that you could write on, microwave to wash it off, and reuse it endlessly.

Since then, they’ve updated their products to use special ink from the Frixion line of pilot pens and added designer paper that can be wiped clean with a spritz of water and a swipe of a towel.

Rocketbook has an app that lets you take a screenshot of your page and send it to one of the destinations you link to the symbols on the pages.

For example, you can send it to a file in your Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, among others, or even have it sent to your email.

Handwriting recognition software can also translate your printed copy into a typed digital one.

You can find out about more features by checking the Rocketbook website

Also, here’s a link to free samples of their notebook pages so you can try it out without paying a thing.

I personally own the Rocketbook fusion, which I like to use for what I call “brain droppings.” You know, all of those notes you need to write down when you’re on the go.

And just recently, I started using my Rocketbook for day trading.

Why is Rocketbook a Good Solution for Keeping a Trading Journal?

So, why would you want to use Rocketbook as a trading journal?

There are a few ways I’ve kept trading journals in the past.

• At first, I had a physical notebook but I’d often get lazy and not write out all of the important details each time because I had to write a new template every session. Sometimes I’m not at home when I trade, so I wouldn’t always have my journal on me, since it was kind of bulky and added extra weight.
• I tried keeping an electronic document for a while but found that I didn’t like this setup either. I genuinely like the feel of paper and pen. I know that I look like I’m 18, but I actually just turned 30 this year and never owned a smartphone or laptop until I was in college.  I still really enjoy the feeling of handwriting and I believe I remember more of what I write than what I type. Also, I tend to stay more engaged when I’m writing than when I’m typing.
• So For the last year or so, I found a solution through using an iPad and pencil and keeping a journal through a new document on the app Goodnotes. This works really well for my needs, but I still ran into issues when my pencil or the iPad when they would lose battery and I’d be left without a journal for the trading session.

But now I think I’ve found my ultimate answer to this conundrum.

The ROCKETBOOK FUSION.

Using a permanent marker, I could create a template for my day trading journal on one of the page layouts. Then, when I’m trading, I can write what I need to record by hand, and after the session, I can upload it through the Rocketbook app so the entry is saved on my google drive. Then, I can wipe it clean and have it ready to use for the next trading session.

How to Turn Your Rocketbook into a Day Trading Journal

Here’s What you need: a Rocketbook Fusion set, black and/or colored Sharpies, a blank piece of paper, and a pencil. (Optional: a ruler)

First, brainstorm what kind of information you want to record in your trading journal.

You may want to add or keep off more information depending on how many pages you want to dedicate to your journal template. I only want to capture and upload one page per trade, so I’m going to stick to the necessary information I’ll need to properly review my trades at the end of the week.

So what’s the most important stats we should record for our trades?

For me, this looks like writing down the date, day of the week, time of the trade. Whether it’s a short or long, how much money is risked, how many lots were bought or sold, as well as the profit and loss and overall percentage of account gained or loss.

But most importantly, I want to be sure to include a good amount of space to write out my thoughts, feelings, and ideas that come to mind while I trade.

This is the kind of information that you’ll want to regularly review in order to improve your trading discipline and strategies. I’m going to want to split these into different sections, one for recording my thoughts intratrade, and one for any ideas or follow-up tasks I should consider doing after the trade.

When I go over my trading journal at the end of the week, I want to be able to add any tasks to my planner from this section that I can work on over the weekend or the following week. 

Next, depending on how much you trust your writing and design skills, you’ll probably want to test out what your format could look like by taking a sheet of paper and outlining the size of the Rocketbook page.

For the Fusion, the dimensions are “5.25 by “8.6” inches. Then, with a pencil or pen, you can map out some possible designs that would meet your needs.

Then, pick a page that you want to use for your template.

Once you create this template, you won’t be able to wipe it off again, so be sure you’re okay with allocating this page to just your trading journal.

I personally like the dotted graph pages best, but you could also do this on a ruled page, too. Also, decide what color sharpies you need, if you like to add color. I like to use a red and green for my short and long options and a blue for my long-form journal sections to help visually organize the page.

Plot an outline on the Rocketbook sheet with a pencil

For those of you who are gifted with great penmanship and drawing skills, you won’t have any problem here, but for yours truly, I’m going to need to put down a pencil layer first and be sure to take my time. You’re going to recreate your template on the Rocketbook page.

Once this is done, it can’t be removed, so take your time to make it look as clean as you like!

Lastly, let’s put this baby to use.

Be sure to have your Rocketbook, Fuxion pens, some water, and towel ready when you start your trading session. Record as you go and be sure to avoid using any other pens with the Rocketbook than the Fuxion ones.

Since I have a mindless habit of reaching for my pen holder, I’ll make sure my desk is perfectly clean while I trade to avoid making a mistake.

At the end of the session, you can select the preset file you want it to go to (mine is set to google drive), record your sheet with the Rocketbook app by taking a picture of the page, and once the file is uploaded, you can add any screenshots you took of your trade to this document as well.

It’s so freakin simple! And might I add, minimalistic!

So in 5 easy steps and for the same price as a fancy notebook and for 2% of the cost of an iPad, you can have your hand-written cake and digitally eat it too.

I sincerely believe the Rocketbook is one of the most underrated tech tools that can help people minimize paper waste and keep an organized, minimalistic workstation. Again, if you want to learn more or purchase a Rocketbook, feel free to use my affiliate link here. By doing so, you also help support me in my endeavor to provide you free and useful tutorials on trading discipline and forex strategies through this blog and Youtube channel.

I can’t wait to hear about how using a Rocketbook as a trading journal helps you, too.

Best of luck and see you out there in the markets!

WORSE THAN FEAR/GREED:

Is There a Day Trading Psychology Foe More Cunning and Dangerous Than These?

There’s a foe that lives close to you.

It’s a pesky foe, one that seems to feed off the kinds of people who are attracted to the idea of day trading.

In fact, this foe is nipping at me as I write this.

When you first learn about trading psychology, you’ll often hear quite a bit about the dual trading antagonists of FEAR and GREED. 

FEAR – the emotion that arises when your trade immediately goes against you and you realize that you need to close a losing trade. It’s the emotion that arises when you get an entry signal but your past experiences with losing are telling you to stay out. It’s the nagging voice in your head that tells you to keep trading that day so that you can cover the week’s losses.

GREED – the emotion that waves its cheerleading pom-pom’s telling you to let a trade “GO GO GO!” and hold on past your take profit target. It’s the delusion that believes, “It’s going to the moon!” without defining how far away that moon is or where the boundary lies that signifies an “overshot.”

You need to be able to understand these two feelings.

You need to be able to recognize them as they occur.

And you need to be able to say to them, “I can feel you Fear/Greed, but I’m choosing my rules anyways.”

But they are not your true foe. 

There’s a more cunning adversary that sends FEAR and GREED your way. Those two are just the messengers.

Who is the monster that seeks to sabotage your trading discipline?

Perfectionism

You see, you wouldn’t even feel fear or greed if you didn’t have a nagging belief that you ought to trade with 100% accuracy and success every time you put on an order.

Who whispers sweet nothings about some lofty standard that exists beyond reality? Perfectionism, that’s who!

[What to read more of my reflections and advice about day trading psychology, be sure to check out my book, The Seven Habits of Successful Day Traders: A Quick Guide to Profitable Day Trading Practices

This blog post is actually inspired by a book I recently read from an author whose writing style I highly admire.

Jon Acuff’s Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done, is a gripping and inspiring read about how to wrestle and win against the greatest threat to actually achieving our goals and getting things finished: Perfectionism.

(By the way, I am not an affiliate of Jon Acuff, I am sharing this recommendation because it’s something I find very valuable and want to pass on to my mentees and students)

In Finish, John personifies Perfectionism (as I have done here) as a persnickety and thwarting bedfellow to the best of our dreams and aspirations. He explains throughout the book how Perfectionism tells us a variety of lies in order to prevent us from moving forward and taking action.

Some of Perfectionism’s lies include:

Quit if it isn’t perfect.

Your goal should be bigger than average.

You need to wait to do X until you do Y.

Among an assortment of other lies that lead us to procrastination, being hard on ourselves, and ultimately failing to achieve what we originally set out to do.

As I was reading this book, I thought to myself, “Oh. This is spot-on. Not just for most goals, but also trading! This is exactly what happens when we make assumptions about continuous positive return.”

Perfectionism’s Role in Day Trading Psychology

Perfectionism leads us to believe that we ought to be able to make a regular profit within a few weeks of learning how to trade.

Perfectionism fools us into thinking that we should expect an 80-100% win rate.

Perfectionism amplifies our feelings of let-down and self-hatred when we make endless mistakes.

Instead, we need to get realistic.

Let go of perfectionism and choose to keep showing up. Forget about some clean, linear straight line of progress with your trading skills and your total account size. 

You might have profitable weeks followed by losing ones. If you’re just starting out, it can easily take two to three years to see your total net earnings in the green. 

Just when you think you’ve mastered taking your stop losses or sticking to your rule of three trades or less a day, one day your discipline goes haywire and you do some considerable damage to your account.

But before I leave you feeling deflated or hopeless in the face of what is a wild and unpredictable plight ahead, let’s go over a few ways we can make authentic progress with our day trading psychology without letting perfectionism drive the train.

How to Apply These Lessons to Your Day Trading Psychology Plan

Pointers for making realistic trading goals (as inspired by Acuff’s suggestions for stifling Perfectionism):

1. Cut the goal in half – If you started out with a goal to make 20% off of your account each month, try cutting it down to 0%. Or if your goal is to grow your account to $50,000, trim it down to $25,000 first. In this way, you can take smaller baby steps to your larger long-term goal.
2. Double the amount of time you are giving yourself to achieve your goal – if you are aiming to be profitable in the next six months, how about stretching that out to at least a whole year (or likely longer)? 
3. Add on new routines and new trading tactics a little at a time – Through the discipline resources I offer I tend to make a lot of recommendations for different actions to take to improve trading discipline. Instead of trying to do everything at once, pick a few suggestions at a time and see if you can implement them well for a while before taking on new tactics and routines.
4. Have fun on the journey– It may seem obvious that you would hopefully find some enjoyment out of trading if it’s the endeavor you’re choosing to use to make more money in your life, but once we get into “goal mode,” humans tend to get serious. Perfectionism would rather see you stressed out and doubling down on your intent to profit from day trading. But introducing fun into your routine and your experience can help you stay more serene and avoid anxiety- which is an emotion that tempts us into making mistakes. Instead, allow yourself to stay curious, intrigued by the markets, and make your trading practice and work sessions more enjoyable. Personally, I like to play music when I practice, backtest, and even when I trade live. Trading memes can help you laugh at the problems a lot of different traders make. Always be responsible and diligent, but don’t forget to laugh and enjoy yourself!

Let’s talk about the top five trading routines you can use to develop trading discipline and improve your trading skills!

You know, there’s something profoundly human about keeping routines. Think about some of the routines you keep. Whether it’s brushing your teeth two times a day, having a coffee while reading a self-help book in the morning, or going to the gym four times a week. Perhaps at first when the routine was new, it took more time than it does now and there might have been some

 psychological push back against doing this thing on a regular basis. But over time, you got used to the motions, you memorized the steps of the routine, you were able to start performing the task without effort, and the energy required to start it is no longer demanding.

There are so many things we need to do to survive and stay healthy, so it kind of makes sense, biologically speaking, to be able to become accustomed to a routine in a way that requires less energy and focus to perform as you continuously do it over time. I’m here to tell you that trading well is no different from other routines that keep us well and healthy over time. There are certain things successful traders do consistently which losing traders don’t do frequently or fail to do at all. We’re going to go over the top 5 key trading routines you can keep as a day trader who is aiming for success

Let’s dive in!

Trading Routine #5: Recording the outcomes of your trades in a long-term trading log

Do you know, right now, how much you have returned or lost this particular month? Or how many trades you’ve taken so far? If not, it’s time to start recording your trades in a long-term log. A decent trading log should consist of 3 things:

1. Information from each of your individual trades

2. A breakdown of your return and loss from each week

3. Any deposits or withdrawals from your account.

The purpose of a trading log is to be able to track the return from each of your trades, as well as keep an account of your brokerage account balance. Most of the time, your brokerage can provide this information for you, but it’s a good practice to record this information for yourself so that you are sure to review it and reflect on your overall performance. I find I keep better records when I record my trades after each trading session, but you could also record them once a week, like on a Friday to tie up the trading week, by referencing the data from your brokerage firm.

Trading Routine # 4: Prepare for the week ahead

This routine is not as structured as the last routine, but that depends on what you need to do to prepare for your trading strategies. This could involve preparing on a 

Sunday morning or evening by checking the economic calendar for the week and writing these times down. It can also involve setting an intention for the week ahead.

For example, if you got too greedy and held past your take profit the week before, you can write down an affirmation that you will be vigilant to avoid doing the same thing this week. I like to trade with the same position size all week, so I’ll usually write down and preset my order sizes based upon the amount of money I choose to risk for each trade. This is also a good time to draw any support or resistance levels from the daily and weekly charts if that’s a tool you like to use to trade.

Trading Routine #3: Mentally Prepare yourself before you trade

Think about high performers. A lot of athletes talk about having mental prep sessions before a game where they help themselves get into a zone. It can be a song that helps them pump up or a warm-up routine that tells their body it’s game time. Remember, your ability to stay level-headed and disciplined while you trade is crucial to your success. So perhaps instead of getting too wired before you trade, you’ll want to keep a start-up routine to help you get centered and focused. You can meditate before you trade or write out a declaration for yourself that you’ll say aloud, promising yourself that you will follow your trading rules today. This is also a good time to quickly reflect on the biggest trading mistakes you want to watch out for. 

So too, performing a visualization of yourself following through on your trading rules can also be beneficial. By the way, if you want a free checklist to help you follow through on some of these daily trading routines, you can download it here. Your headspace is the worst place to store your ideas and commitments. It’s better to have visual reminders of what we need to do to succeed and checklists are a handy tool used by professionals to ensure they follow through on their services. Okay, let’s move on!

The next two routines we’re really hard to rank. I couldn’t decide which one is more deserving of the #1 spot. But I think I made the right choice and I’ll tell you why soon. 

Trading Routine #2: Journal your trades

This is different from keeping a trading log.

A trading journal is where you can record not only the data of your trades but also any thoughts or emotions you had while you traded. Since intense emotional experiences are often the reason why many of us make mistakes while we trade, it’s helpful to write them down so we can discover what mental states or situations we need to improve.

For example, you could be waiting to take your stop loss, but as the price gets closer, you decide to move it out of the way to another price that is risking two to three times more than what you intended. During that moment you may be feeling intense anxiety. That’s one of the best times to write down what’s going on and why you’re feeling that way. Getting this out on paper may help you recognize that this is an emotional reaction and help you return to your rules.

That’s also why I like to add my trading rules to my trading journal so I can see them while I record what’s going on. If you want to see an example of this, I made a free trading journal for the once-a-day Disciplined FX scalping strategy I posted here on the Disciplined FX blog.

When keeping a trading journal, be sure to fill it out every time you trade, while you’re trading. Some people, myself included, like to take screenshots of the trade and store them in a distinct file on the computer. This is helpful for recognizing patterns in the market and in your trading behaviors. However, there’s one more thing you need to do with your trading journal and that helps us segue to the #1 routine on this list

Trading Routine#1: Review Your Trades

The top routine you can keep for your trading practice is to review your trades. Now, it’s a lot easier to review your trades when you have a trading journal and a log. But the reason why a review session is number one on this list instead of journaling your trades is that collecting information can only do so much for us. We have to analyze and act on the data we collect in order to make the best use of it. For this routine, I recommend sitting down either at the end of the trading week or right before your next one and go over every trade you performed that week. Look at each individual journal and notice what kinds of thoughts and feelings you experienced with each trading day. If you saved screenshots of your trades, go over these as well. Pick out which trade was your best trade (that is, the one in which you followed your rules to a T), and which one was your worst. Notice what mistakes you made and think about ways you can improve. This is also a good time to calculate your profit and loss for the week. I like to review my trades on a Sunday evening so that they are fresh in my mind for the week ahead. 

So, let me know in the comments below which trading routines you want to focus on including in your trading practice. Are there any routines that I missed that you think also belong on this list? Your insightful and respectful feedback is always appreciated!

If this is your first time thinking about keeping trading routines, I recommend beginning with the top two, which is keeping a trading journal and reviewing it once a week, because this practice will have the greatest effect on your trading discipline and confidence. By examining what’s going on when you trade, you can help dispel some of the confusion and anxiety that comes with learning how to trade. I hope this list has you thinking about the ways you can structure your trading for success. 

Best of strength and luck, and I’ll see you out there in the markets!