Most people who arrive at Major have never actually looked at their own trading. They have a feeling about how they trade, assembled out of the sessions they remember — and the sessions you remember are the dramatic ones, while the trades that cost you are usually boring.
This replaces the feeling with a number. It does not grade your week. It works out how often you followed your own process, what breaking your own rules has cost you in actual money, and which single thing you keep repeating.
A page of sentences about how the session felt is a record of your mood, not your decisions. You cannot total it, you cannot compare one month to the next, and you can talk yourself out of any line in it — which is exactly why that format survives.
The other failure is length. A journal with fourteen fields is completed for nine days and abandoned in the tenth week, and the weeks it gets abandoned in are the ones with the most in them. Three taps survives a bad Tuesday.
You are not trying to remember the trade. You are trying to be able to count it.
Won or lost, and roughly how much. You tell the journal one thing before you start — what a losing trade normally costs you — and after that it prices the buttons for you. Tap the closest. It stores the answer as a proportion of that figure, so if you pass an evaluation and your size changes you update one number and every week you have already logged still lines up.
The one that matters, and the one people quietly get wrong. If you say no, you pick what happened from a fixed list rather than typing a sentence — because a list can be counted and a sentence cannot, and the whole point is to find the one you repeat. Note that skipping a valid setup is on that list too. Deviation is not only the trades you took.
One to five in the ten seconds before you clicked, where one is calm and five is not really thinking straight. It is the only subjective thing here and it earns its place, because it gets compared against the question above — which is how you find out how wound up you actually are on the trades where you break your own rules. Most people are surprised by that number.
After a couple of weeks the review splits every figure two ways: what you make when you trade your plan, and what you make when you do not. It is the same trader, the same setups and the same market, with one variable changed.
Nobody has ever argued with that block, because it is not our opinion about discipline. It is their own arithmetic, in their own money.
If you can see the pattern in your own data, you can fix it. If you cannot see it, that is what an outside set of eyes is for.
Everything stays on this device. Your setups, your notes and your levels are never sent anywhere — Major sees whether you are logging and whether you are following your plan more or less than you were, never your edge.
Roughly. The typical one, not the worst one you have ever had. Everything after this is priced off it, so you never type an amount again.
Stays on this device. Change it whenever your size does.
The same trader, the same setups, the same market. One variable changed.
Calm runs 1 to 5, where 1 is calm and 5 is not really thinking straight.
A week where you followed your plan less than 80% of the time is marked. Not because 80% is sacred, but because a process you follow 80% of the time beats a perfect one you follow 40% of the time.
One thing. Written down. In your own words.
You do not need a list. A list is how you avoid changing anything — it spreads the discomfort thinly enough that none of it requires action this week. What moves a trader's numbers is finding the single repeated decision that costs the most and putting one rule in front of it.
Name the decision, not the feeling. “I re-enter within ten minutes of a stop-out” is a decision. “I get frustrated” is not, and you cannot put a rule in front of it.
Written so somebody else could tell you whether you had broken it. If it needs your judgement in the moment, it is not a rule, it is a hope.
A rule with no checkpoint is an intention. This is the line that turns it into something the journal can score.
If you can see the pattern in your own data, you can fix it. If you cannot see it, that is what an outside set of eyes is for.
Rewrite this when the answer changes. It should change roughly monthly. If it has not changed in three months, the rule is not being applied.