How do you log your trades to know whether your strategy works?

Every metric that defines a strategy — win rate, risk-reward, profit factor, drawdown — comes from one place: your data. Without an orderly record of your trades, you're not evaluating your trading, you're guessing. The log is the raw material for everything else.

Why can't you evaluate what you don't record?

Because memory lies. You remember the brilliant trade and forget the three impulsive ones; you inflate your wins and downplay your errors. If you want to know whether your strategy has a real edge, you need the raw data, not your recollection of it. An honest backtest validates the past, but your live log is what confirms that edge survives in your actual trading.

What should you record on each trade?

Enough to reconstruct the trade and compute the metrics, without making it so heavy you stop doing it:

• Pair, date and time — to cross-reference with the session and market context.
• Entry, stop and target — the plan you entered with.
• Result in money or in R (multiples of your risk).
• Reason for entry — did it meet your setup or did you improvise?
• Position size — so drawdown and risk are real.

With these fields, the metrics that matter compute themselves.

In R or in money?

Logging in R — multiples of your risk, where 1R is what you risk per trade — is the cleanest. A +2R trade means you made twice what you risked, regardless of account size. Thinking in R frees you from the noise of money and lets you see the real structure of your strategy: how many R you win on average, how many you lose, and whether the whole thing adds up.

How does the log turn into decisions?

The value isn't in recording, it's in reviewing. Every week or every 20-30 trades, look at the set: do your real win rate and R:R resemble the backtest's? Do your losses cluster in one session, one pair or one mood? That's where the log stops being bookkeeping and becomes a map for improvement. Forex Command's trade journal is built for this: it logs each trade with its result, context and size, so the review is fast and honest.

The bottom line

Logging isn't bureaucracy: it's the only way for your strategy to stop being an opinion and become data. The backtest gives you the hypothesis, forward testing puts it to the test, and your log is what measures the result. Without it, everything else is faith.