I have kept a written journal of my trades for quite some time however I didn't move to recording the trading day until recently. I installed the free version of flashback express. https://www.flashbackrecorder.com/express/ Very easy to use. Hit record and you don't have to mess with anything else. What I did was set the player to record on a 1TB hard drive that I am not using for anything else. I don't know how many trading days it will store yet; I will upgrade if needed. My intention is to classify days by quality. I am using a 1-5 grading system on each trade (1 being stupid: 5 being perfect). I will record each trading day and from my grading system I will name each recording by an overall "grade" using an average for the day. My plan will probably change after I use it for a while. So far it is nice to watch every trade in hindsight. I can look at things that were overlooked. I can try to identify what I should have been looking for when a trade went bad. I can try to identify what I did right. I have an excel spreadsheet journal form I currently use. I have columns that are checked off regarding my parameters. Depending on the trade I might not fill it out accurately. I think the replay will help me review the trades in more detail. My question? Do you record your trades and if so; do you have any helpful advice?
I record sessions on and off but I find it very hard to sit and re-watch the action. I have that same recording software, you can set the settings so the files are not that big. A 2.5 hour session takes 90mb if no sound and is in excellent quality. My new plan is to record with sound and verbalize my thoughts and feelings while watching the market and in trades. I think this will make re-watching the action a lot more valuable.
Yes, I use to talk about this a lot here when I arrived to this forum. I've done it for about 15 years but they contain more than just my trading...they contain everything (including the audio) of my personal life that occurred in my home office via the audio that's correlated with what's occurring on the multi-screens. For example, the first time my kids walked (audio), times when having sex with the spouse in the home office (audio), conversations on the telephone that occurred during trading (video and audio) and many other things (audio). Its very private like a diary and a ton of data. Another example, I've recorded what occurred on most trading days via slowly scrolling through summaries from Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, CNBC and such. Thus, much more than just recordings of charts, trading platform and trades as they occurred. Yet, I notice that the older the recordings on DVD...the slower it takes the computer to load it...I'm not sure if this has to do with the age of the DVD. Same problem when I view the recordings on a friends desktop or laptop. Screen recordings with audio makes the files much larger. I store all video recordings on a portable hard-drive and then make DVD copies of each 1 - 3 days from the portable hard-drive storage. Yeah, its a ton of work. The screen-recorder I use is Techsmith Camtasia Studio/Snagit. Yet, a recent upgrade...I've had some issues with multi-monitor recordings. I trade via 3 large HDMI TVs.
No. I don't record my trades or maintain a journal. I try not to dwell on the past, or future, too much -- at least in regards to trading No amount of analyzing or staring at a chart will make a difference; it's all about Now. Your judgement call now. In this present moment. You can beat yourself up all you want to in hindsight while trying to reasonably rationalize everything...but trading is part art, part science. Successfully trading is truly a skill, or craft, in its own right. I don't know what you trade, and how -- But I trade the daily SPY/DOW chart. Depending on what you trade, maybe more or less...it can benefit some people to record their actions, or maintain a journal of some sort. I've been doing this for years, and years...So my 'learning' stage is really minuscule, or less important now. If you're New...I think you can really benefit from Reflecting...at those journals or records of your trading actions.
spending hours to watch recordings of yourself trading looks like a huge waste of time. A screenshot would be sufficient. If you cannot spell out your reasons, they probably aren't good enough.
I've been thinking about doing voice recordings myself; it would be a great way to remember what I was thinking at the time.
When I was a teenager...a girlfriend of mine revealed she has maintained a "diary" of her life since 10 years old. I often wonder about the purpose of such. She said its the same reason why people take pictures/videos of their kids growing up, their family changing over the years, special events, photos/videos of vacations and so on. Ok, I understood the preservation of history (a diary) but I still didn't really get it until a neighbor's house down the street burned down. I remember the family weeping outside about their destroyed house. The father stated every thing in the house can be replaced except for the history of a few generations of their family...the photos and other documentations...all destroyed. History and documentation of such is very important to some folks. Imagine only reading about World War II or I via text only...no photos and no videos ? Yet, I still didn't understand the personal importance of history until my grandmother's death. She had a lot of knowledge about the family history that she shared very little...how our family got split into two...her grand parents history. 1/2 went to reservations in the states and the other 1/2 (earlier) growing in France after relocation from the French/Indian War (Seven Years War) or La guerre de la Conquête. Two locations in the world that eventually merged into their surrounding communities. I lost a lot of the family history from her death and still piecing together the family history. Soon after that, I started taking my own family photos, maintaining a diary. I even made photo copies of old family photos and begin writing about the stories told by the elderly. I traveled when I was young and competing in sports. I would visit relatives in Arizona, the Dakotas, Ohio and I then went to France to visit relatives...documenting and photographing the history of the family. 1990...a close friend from Brazil asked me why ? I didn't really have a good answer except to say that it was fun...like a hobby that I enjoyed doing. One day in the fall of 2016, I became very ill and collapsed at the hospital while on vacation in Europe. I woke up a few months later from a coma in another hospital. When I open my eyes...I had family there at my side from France, Canada, Ohio, Chicago and Arizona. I was then flown back to Canada (where I currently live with my family) to recover at the hospital here in Québec City. During that coma...my brother that didn't care about history...decided to document my ordeal via his iPhone. He tells me about a native indian and her daughter asking him why he's recording a video of me. They thought it was disrespectful. He said its something that I would do to maintain the history and thought it would be funny to see myself hooked up to all those machines to keep me alive. In the hospital, I met this beautiful nurse. Pale white as can be but with a very strange thick long dark braided hair down to her butt...at the time...the view of her seemed familiar or distant. My ex-spouse would visit me often in the hospital to ensure I spent a lot of time with my kids. One of my kids would stare at the nurse. I just thought he was very attracted to her considering she's very attractive especially since he's now a young teenager...at the age where he's becoming more curious about girls. She asked him jokingly in the room while she was changing one of the catheters in my neck...what was he looking at ? He then said to her that she looks like his great-grandmother from one of my old photos. She told him that's not possible considering I was born from Chicago. My son, his next visit to the hospital to see me...he brought one of our family photo albums and a few videos my grandfather had made in the 1960's that I have made copies the late 1990's...he then saw the nurse again and showed it to her. The nurse was amazed at the history I maintained and how far I've traveled to document the history of the family. I told her I document a lot of my life, my kids life, my trading career to prevent losing that history if/when I die...so that some events that may not be important to me but may be important to another family member. Thus, it will never be forgotten. Anyways, I asked the nurse where's she from ? She said she's French Canadian but was born in the Upper Peninusula of Michigan. Her family had immigrated to Québec City when she was a little girl in the late 70's but she didn't know anything about the history of her family. I'm out of the hospital now...still recovering although in better shape than I was prior to my illness. Now just an outpatient that's still under the hospital care until November 2017...monthly blood tests. I'm now dating the nurse. I've documented everything since I was a young teenager. I even have photos and videos of my first sporting competition...thanks to my parents. Later, the same of my first junior national competition and then national competition..its all very private to me and sometimes I don't know why about the documentation although sometimes I think it was because I wanted to do what my first girlfriend did involving her diary. Yet, its just nice to see a history of my thoughts, feelings and how my personal life interacts with my trading career...how my upbringing and experiences influences my trading on any given trading day. I have a history of it and highly recommend it to anyone that's ever enjoyed reading or maintaining a diary (a history). If you don't document it...its lost forever...just like the family history of the nurse I met and now dating from the hospital. So yeah, trading is part art and part science. I now get it and enjoy reading (a better appreciation) my step father's diary when he worked as a floor trader in Chicago.