Written by I’m sure throughout your trading career, you’ve taken those sweet trades, the ones that played out almost perfectly. The problem is that you’ve never been able to consistently reproduce them.
Every now and then, you find another one. But by the time it appears, you’ve already given back the gains from the previous trade. Then the next good trade ends up recovering losses instead of building your account.
My team and I were in exactly that position back in 2016-2017, when trading was still new to us. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so we kept chasing that feeling of finding the “perfect” trade.
Then one day, I sat down, took a screenshot of my best trade, printed it, and stuck it on the wall directly in front of my desk.
Two days later, I was watching the charts and saw something familiar.
I looked up at the screenshot.
It was the same pattern.
But only two days had passed since my last good trade, and luckily, my account wasn’t deep in draw-down. So I took the trade and this time, I recorded everything.
That trade went 5R.
For the first time, my account was back in the green.
Later that day, something clicked.
I had just seen the same good setup twice in a single week.
That meant patterns repeat.
My job wasn’t to constantly search for new trades. My job was to wait for the pattern I already knew worked to show up again.
Then I asked myself: How do I remember this?
Because relying on memory in trading is a sure way to fail.
So that same day, I bought a notebook and started recording everything the setups, conditions, entries, mistakes, outcomes, and anything else I could identify.
Within one month, I discovered more about my trading than I had learned in the previous four years.
This was the biggest lesson You don’t need more trades. You need to understand the few patterns that actually work for you and have enough data to recognize them when they return.
That is where consistency starts. Your job as a trader is simple.
In the beginning years of your career, your main job is to find a setup that can consistently produce a 35–45% win rate with positive expectancy. The good news is that there are plenty of profitable setups. You don’t need to invent one. You need to find one that fits you.
Once you have a setup, back test it. Prove that the concept worked historically before risking real money. If the results are promising, move into forward testing for at least three months.
This is where the real learning begins.
As you forward test, collect as much data as possible. Don’t just record whether the trade won or lost. Record the conditions surrounding the trade:
- Market conditions
- Setup type
- Entry and exit
- Time of day
- Day of the week
- Volatility
- Before-and-after screenshots
- Stop-loss and take-profit distance
- Risk-to-reward
- Session
- Direction
- Confluence
- Your emotional state
- Mistakes made
- Whether you followed your rules
This data starts revealing something your memory never will: which versions of your setup actually perform best.
You might discover that your setup has a 45% win rate overall, but performs at 58% during the London session and only 31% during New York. You might discover that trades taken with the higher-time frame trend perform significantly better than counter-trend trades. Or that the setup works exceptionally well on Tuesdays and Wednesdays but consistently struggles on Fridays.
You may also find that one specific market condition produces your biggest winners, while another produces most of your losses.
That is where journaling becomes more than simply recording trades.
It allows you to separate your good trades from your average trades.
Over time, you can identify the characteristics shared by your highest-performing trades and start prioritizing those conditions. Instead of taking every setup your strategy gives you, you begin looking for the setups that have historically given you the best results.
That is how you multiply your best trades.
The goal isn’t to trade more. The goal is to become better at recognizing the trades that deserve your risk.
This is why you need a proper trading journal. A platform like Funded Payouts simplifies the process: upload your trade screenshots and the journal can organize and collect the rest of the data, allowing you to spend less time documenting and more time analyzing what is actually working.
Your memory tells you what you think works.
Your data tells you what actually works.