CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. Excess volatility increases risk further. Be cautious. Past performance is not an indication of future results.
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Upkeep

Questions about keeping a record, not about starting one — Ethiopia

Seventeen answers for someone whose entries already exist: shorthand that stops opening, a column nobody reads, a file too long to sit down with, and where writing less is right.

None of this comes up in the first week: early entries are easy to write and impossible to judge. The awkward ones arrive later, so the answers are grouped by how much record there is. Still deciding what a first entry holds? Start here, the first trade, the word list.

What starts going wrong, and roughly when

Age of the recordWhat starts going wrongThe upkeep it takes
The first few dozen entriesNothing yet — the trades are still rememberedWrite the half that will not be
Half a year inShorthand stops opening; too long to readOne fixed word for the instrument, one for the decision
Past a yearOld entries no longer match the format in useDate each change instead of rewriting the past

Asked in the first few dozen entries

The trade closed at midday and the entry was typed that night. What has already gone?

The figures keep: the spread inside the price, and swap for a night held, read the same at midnight as at noon. What thins out is the expectation — write that first.

The entries are written in shorthand nobody else could read. Does that hold up?

It holds while the shorthand still opens for whoever wrote it. Test one six weeks old: short forms for instruments and hours survive, short forms for reasons rarely do.

Every entry carries a time. Which clock should it use?

Whichever one the platform stamps its own rows with, and it need not match the clock in the room. Entries on another clock work alone, then stop lining up with the history.

An entry was started before the trade and never finished. Keep it?

Keep it. Half an entry written before the outcome was known outranks a complete one written after: the part put down in advance is what nothing else can reconstruct.

One file, or a line wherever is convenient at the time?

One file. Scattered entries survive singly and die as a set: the useful questions need twenty side by side. Keep it apart from wherever the trading happens — Exness Terminal, the Exness Trade app, MetaTrader 4 or 5.

Does every entry need a date, or is the order they were written in enough?

Dates. Order shows what followed what; dates show the distance, and six entries inside one afternoon read nothing like six across two months.

Asked once there is more of it than fits in one sitting

An old entry has to be found again. What makes one findable a year on?

Two fixed words in every entry: the instrument, and one word for the kind of decision. Those make a record searchable rather than scrolled through; elsewhere plain sentences are better left plain.

Date order, or grouped by instrument?

Date order for keeping, grouping for reading. The original stays in the order things happened; when a question needs one instrument together, a copy gets regrouped and thrown away.

A demo and a real account are both running. One record or two?

One, with the account named on every entry. Split them and the practice half quietly disappears — though demo results do not guarantee real-account results: real money brings feelings practice never charged for. Name the type: account types.

A new column started this month. Do the older entries get filled in to match?

Filling them in now writes today's knowledge into a past decision. Start the column from the day it was added and note that date, so shorter early entries read as history rather than neglect.

There is now more record than fits in one sitting. Which part gets read?

The part next to a decision being taken today. Reading it end to end stops being possible by the second month, which is no failure — pull the entries on the same instrument or reasoning.

Most of the record is about an instrument that was dropped. Dead weight?

Cheap to keep, awkward to rebuild — and the reason it was dropped usually sits in those entries. Nothing written before an outcome is worth deleting: reading a chart back.

Asked while pruning, pausing or stopping

A column has not been read in months. Does dropping it spoil what came before?

Dropping it is fine; one dated line saying it ended stops the blanks reading later as forgetfulness. The column never to drop is whichever gets filled in before a trade opens.

After a long spell away from trading, is the old record still the one to continue?

Yes, and the first entries after the gap deserve extra care: time away resets what the writer takes for granted. Reading a few old ones first prevents starting a second by accident.

Someone else's format looks better than the one in use. Switch now?

One column at a time, and date the change. A wholesale switch restarts the record: old entries stop matching, stop being opened, and a year-old habit is a fortnight old again.

Does this ever finish, or does it run as long as the trading does?

The writing thins out; the rereading does not stop. Once the same entry stops reappearing, one line per trade can become one a week without much being lost.

Nothing in the record has ever been read back. Is it worth keeping at all?

Not as it stands — writing is the cheap half, reading is the half that pays. The repair is one date a month, starting with entries old enough to have been forgotten: beginner mistakes.

What a well-kept record does not do

  • It does not make trading safer. Many people lose money when they start trading, usually by rushing and risking too much too early. Entries shorten the time a habit takes to spot, nothing more.
  • It does not forecast. Prices move constantly and nobody can predict those moves reliably, so a thick file says nothing about tomorrow.
  • It does not replace the rules. An exit level set before a trade opens, and an amount that could go entirely without the month changing, matter more than any column: risk basics.
  • This site is an independent guide, not a broker. It opens no accounts and holds no money; anything about an account itself goes to Exness support, available 24/7, while a question about a page here can be sent from the help page. How these pages work: about this site.

The entries that cost nothing are the ones to practise on.

A demo account at Exness runs on virtual money with no time limit, so an entry beside a practice trade costs nothing and reads back like any other.

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