Crypto trading journal: a practical guide

For each trade, log the coin or pair, whether it was spot or a perpetual, your direction, entry and exit, stop, size and result. If you used leverage, record it — a 3% move means something very different at 1x than at 20x.

Attach a chart screenshot at entry so you can review the setup, not just the number.

On perps, funding and fees quietly eat returns, especially if you hold. Log them so your net result is honest — a strategy that looks profitable gross can bleed out through funding.

There are no fixed sessions like forex, but liquidity and volatility still cluster around the Asian, European and US windows and around major news. Tag the time of your entries so you can see when you actually trade well.

Because crypto ranges are wide, position sizing and stop placement decide whether a normal pullback is a scratch or a blow-up. Record your risk percentage on every trade and judge the process, not just the outcome.

Name the setup and tag any mistakes — chased a pump, over-levered, moved the stop. Standardized mistake tags show you which habit is costing the most over time.

The payoff is forward-looking: in DIONFX, the Setup Checker compares a planned trade to how similar setups have actually performed for you — before you enter — so your record can talk you out of the bad ones.