Trade journal: what works and what to drop

2 min read · Win rate, Profit Factor, conclusions by strategy and exit reason.

Level:

Short version for experts: tables, lists and screenshots only.

Words in this lesson (6)

Target (take-profit) — A price chosen in advance at which the trade is closed with a profit.

Spread — The difference between two prices. In the order book — between the best bid and the best ask. In arbitrage — between the price of the same asset on two venues.

Opportunity (arbitrage pair) — A pair of trades in arbitrage: where we buy and where we sell.

Screener — A filtering program: it scans hundreds of stocks or coins and shows only those that match the given criteria.

Win rate — The share of trades closed in profit. On its own it says nothing about profitability: what matters too is how much a winning trade brings and how much a losing one takes.

Profit Factor — The sum of all profits divided by the sum of all losses. Above 1 — the trading is profitable.

What's on the screen

The "Trade journal" answers one question: what works and what needs to be dropped. It takes all closed trades and breaks them down by strategy, exit reason, day of the week and trading session.

Six numbers at the top

Metric	What it means	How to read it
Win rate	the share of trades closed in profit	on its own it says nothing about profitability
Total NET	the result across all trades after costs	the key number
Average NET	the result of one average trade	must be above zero
Profit Factor	total profits ÷ total losses	above 1 — the system is profitable; above 1.5 — good
Best	the most profitable trade
Worst	the biggest losing trade	compare it with the average profit

Compare "Worst" with "Average NET". In the screenshot: the average trade brings $4.87, and the worst took $72.84 — so one trade wiped out the result of fifteen average ones. That's normal for a high win rate strategy, but it means rare big losses need to be limited separately.

The "Conclusions and recommendations" block

MAMAY writes its conclusions in plain text. In red with a ⚠ — what's losing money:

a losing strategy — a trade type that's in the red overall;
a losing exit rule — a closing reason after which the result is negative.

What to do about it:

Find the red row with the biggest loss.
See how many trades are behind it. Two trades — too early to conclude anything. Forty — it's a rule.
Open the "Screener builder" and turn off that strategy or change the exit rule.
Check the journal again in a week.

Exit reasons

A trade can close in different ways: the spread converged, a trailing take-profit fired, the holding limit expired, a rotation happened (the slot was freed for a better opportunity). The journal counts the result for each reason separately.

An example from the screenshot: the "Holding limit expired" exit — 4 trades, −$44. So trades that never converged within the allotted time close with a noticeable loss. A question to ask yourself: why didn't the opportunity converge, and could you have seen it earlier?

Export

The "Export to Excel" button saves the journal to a file — for your own review or for tax records.

↗ Open "Journal" in MAMAY ↗ Screener builder in MAMAY