Why P&L alone hides the real problem
Outcome and process are two different things, and only one of them is under your control. A trade that followed the plan and still lost is a good loss — nothing to fix. A trade that broke your rules and paid anyway is the dangerous one, because the money just rewarded the habit that will eventually cost you the account.
If your journal only stores the result, those two trades look the same at review time. Recording the process alongside the result is what separates them.
What Edgelog records on every trade
- Mindset — the state you were in, picked from a grouped list: disciplined (focused, calm, patient, confident, in flow), neutral (neutral, tired, uncertain) and risky (impulsive, FOMO, fearful, hesitant, revengeful, overconfident, bored, tilted). The colour tells you which side of the line a trade sat on before you read a single number.
- Mistake — what actually went wrong, grouped by where it happened: entry (chased, no confirmation, against the trend), risk (oversized, no stop, widened stop), exit (early exit, held too long, winner turned loser) and behaviour (revenge trade, FOMO, overtrading, averaged down). You can tag more than one, because most bad trades have more than one cause.
- Execution grade (1–5 stars → A+ to D) — how well you followed your own plan, independent of whether the trade paid. The scale is written into the app, so five stars means the same thing in March as it did in January.
- Setup tags — the pattern behind the entry, so psychology can be read against strategy rather than in isolation.
- Notes and chart screenshots — the context you will not remember in three weeks.
Trades arrive automatically from MT4 and MT5 via the free EdgelogSync Expert Advisor, from Binance and Bybit through read-only API keys, or by CSV/Excel import from any other broker. The psychological layer is the part you add — it takes seconds per trade, and it is the part that pays.
Rate the decision, not the result
The single rule that makes a psychology journal worth keeping: set the rating before you look at the P&L. A losing trade that followed the plan perfectly deserves 5 stars. A winner taken on FOMO with triple size deserves 1. Rate the outcome instead and the score becomes a second copy of your P&L, which tells you nothing you did not already know.
Used that way, the rating becomes a grade for your discipline rather than your luck. Edgelog turns the stars into a letter — A+ for a textbook trade down to D for one that should never have been taken — and spells out what each level means so the standard does not drift over a year:
- A+ — textbook. A+ setup, planned entry and size, exit as planned.
- A — solid. Plan followed with one small slip: slightly early or late, size a touch off.
- B — acceptable. Valid setup, sloppy management: stop moved, target cut short, hesitated.
- C — marginal. Thin or forced setup, or a rule broken that you happened to get away with.
- D — should not have been taken. No setup: FOMO, revenge, oversized, or no stop at all.
A run of profitable C and D trades is the earliest warning you will get that a good month is about to end badly.
The three tags that explain most losing months
Revenge trading
Entering again immediately after a loss, usually larger, to get it back. It shows up in a journal as a cluster of trades within minutes of a loss, often with no setup tag attached because there was no setup.
FOMO entries
Chasing a move that already happened because watching it go without you feels worse than losing money. Typically tagged late entry, no confirmation, or chased entry.
Trading while tired or distracted
The least dramatic and most expensive of the three. It rarely produces one disaster; it produces a slow drift of slightly worse entries and slightly earlier exits that a monthly P&L never attributes to its actual cause.
What to review each week
- Pull up the trades where you logged a mistake. Is it the same mistake, or five different ones? The same mistake repeating is a rule problem; five different ones is usually a state problem — you were tired, rushed, or off-plan generally.
- Look at your winners with a low execution rating. Those are the trades that paid you for breaking a rule.
- Open the Playbook. Setup tags and execution grades each carry their own live count, net P&L and win rate there, so you can answer the two questions that matter in one screen: is this setup working, and am I executing it? A setup with a positive edge at A+ and a negative one at C is an execution problem, not a strategy problem.
- Write one sentence in the daily journal about how the session felt. Over a month that sentence is the pattern.
What this is not
Edgelog does not give AI feedback on your psychology, does not backtest, and has no market replay. It records what you tell it and shows it back to you next to the numbers — the thinking stays yours. There is no mobile app yet, and automatic sync covers MT4, MT5, Binance and Bybit; every other broker comes in by CSV or Excel import.
It is free with unlimited trades, no credit card and no trial clock, so the only thing it costs you is the few seconds per trade it takes to be honest with yourself.