 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker mindset. In this episode, I wanna talk to you about how I'm going to be tracking my trades in 2023. Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret. Trading requires total mental and emotional control. It requires the Trade Hacker mindset. All right, so let's jump into this discussion about how I will be tracking my trades in 2023. You can also go to navigationtrading.com slash journal navigationtrading.com slash journal and you'll be able to get an idea of what I'm using. So it's a web-based application and basically what it is going to allow me to do is it's kind of a spreadsheet on steroids. So it's going to allow me to really get much more statistical data around my trades, performance information, your basic stuff, win loss, average return, all the stuff that we as traders need to understand about our strategies. So the cool thing about this is it allows me to upload my trades and I do this once a day. So at the end of the day or before the next trading day, I just go to my broker, upload a CSV file, upload it to the system, it takes about less than two minutes. And then once the trades are in the system, then I can go in and customize things. Like I can tag that specific trade as the type of strategy that I trade. We trade a lot of multi-leg, different variations of different option spreads kind of combined together to make one type of strategy. So you can combine those and tag them as a specific strategy. That way you're getting statistical data on that particular methodology. So that's cool. And then the other piece is the statistics that it can pump out for you. And again, if you're audio only, you won't be able to see this, but if you're on YouTube, you'll be able to see all of the different types of things that you can look at to compare your statistics. Obviously you've got your win rate, you've got your average return, you've got your daily P&L, you've got your profit and all that stuff. But it also allows you to dig a little bit deeper and it allows you to easily click on a specific strategy. And then I can say, okay, here's how this has been doing over a specific period of time. So you can segment by periods of time. You can segment by the actual strategy. You can segment the software by the symbol that you're trading. So maybe you trade a lot of SPX. So you can look at just your SPX trades. Maybe you trade a lot of futures. So you can segment just by your futures trades or just by your trades on individual stocks or whatever it might be. We trade a lot of different strategies. And so it's the ability to do that is pretty cool. The other thing that you can do is you can actually journal these trades. So on the site here, I'm showing an example where I can open up a specific trade and it gives me the ability to type notes. It gives me the ability to give my thoughts that I had at the time of the trade. You know, I trade a lot and I trade every single day. So for me to go back and look at a specific trade and see that it was a losing trade, for me to have a lot of memory around what happened there, it's probably not gonna happen, especially if it's a month or two later. So what I can do is I can actually type notes. And one thing that I'm a big fan of, and obviously this podcast is called the Trade Hacker Mindset, is I'm a big proponent of documenting the mental side of your trades. So maybe that was you weren't in a good headspace to be trading that day. Maybe you had some type of big project that you were working on that was taking away, that was distracting you from your trading. You can make notes about that on each individual trade and or you can document those notes on just specific trading days in general. So you can look at your trading calendar and make notes and documentations about what was going on that day. You know, you can make notes about maybe it was the FOMC announcement or a CPI announcement or some big economic data announcement that would have an abnormal effect potentially on the price action of the individual symbols that you're trading that day. So all of those things as you go back and you're analyzing your trades and you're trying to figure out how you can become a better trader, all of that stuff can be documented all into one place. The other cool thing about this and this is not gonna pertain to everybody but I trade multiple accounts. You know, so I have one account that I just trade futures in. I have one account that I trade specific strategies in. I have another account that I trade other strategies in. And maybe you have an IRA and a margin account and a cash account or whatever it might be but you can upload all those into this platform. And what that allows you to do is you can segment analysis by specific account. You can bring them all together to analyze all of your trades all as one portfolio. And there's just an infinite number of ways to slice and dice the different analysis that you're trying to determine based on the type of trading you do. The other thing is, you know, I mentioned notes and you can type in notes about maybe a mistake you made or whatever but there's also a component within the software specifically two mistakes. So let's say that you have a very specific trading strategy and one of the mistakes that you tend to make over and over is that you get out too early. So you can create kind of a template mistake that is called exit too early or something like that. And you can document that by a single click by just adding that as a mistake to your view on the screen. So as you're scanning through your trades and let's say you just wanna scan through your losses and see what kind of notes or mistakes that you might have made, it's just quick and easy to scan and see and document those types of things. You know, I mentioned a, you know, allocating and or excuse me, analyzing trades from a specific date or custom date range. You know, maybe there's a specific situation where over a period of time implied volatility was super high. You know, everything was moving really crazy. So it would be interesting to go back to your trades and see how did these different strategies perform in this specific market environment? So when that market environment comes around again, you will know that maybe strategy A is not what you wanna be trading and you wanna focus more on allocating money to strategy B or vice versa. The other thing is if you, one thing that I haven't been good at with, you know, just tracking my stuff on spreadsheets is, you know, long versus short. You know, obviously if you're in a bullish market and you continue to do, you know, short Delta short bias trades, those probably aren't going to do very well versus if you're in a down market and you're doing nothing but bullish strategies, that's probably not gonna perform very well. So being able to look at the side of the trade, whether it's a long or short trade can be a big benefit to go back and do in the analysis of your trades. Obviously that becomes hindsight, right? That was what you didn't know that was going to happen to begin with but all of these little insights, all of these little details that you document about your trading is going to compound and accumulate into a pile of mental notes and now, you know, documenting in here actual physical viewable notes that you can go back and use to become a better trader. Now, this podcast, The Trade Hacker Mindset all about the mental part. I cannot stress enough how documenting your trades in detail can help you from a psychological standpoint. We talk about position size a lot and maybe that's a mistake that you see yourself making. I got too big on this specific trade but all of these little things that create issues in your trading, if you can document those and analyze those and go back and think about those and so that when you get in that situation again, you continue to minimize the mistakes. We will never, we will, as traders, we will never eliminate mistakes. We will never eliminate losses but you don't have to to be profitable if you can minimize and you can lessen those losses and lessen and take benefits from those trading lessons, you are going to see your P&L explode. So this is what I'm doing starting in 2023. Obviously starting out, I'm not going to have a ton of data on my trades. I still have my old spreadsheets that I can refer back to as well but going forward over the next six months, 12 months, 18 months, three years, 10 years, we will have a very complete compounded effect of all of the benefits that we'll see from trading and so really excited about that. I think it's going to even take my trading to another level and I hope you look at doing something similar because it will absolutely help your trading. There's nothing negative that I can tell you about documenting trades. Only positive, the only negative is you have to put in the time. So make the leap, do it, and I look forward to being there with you in 2023. Take care.