Building a Trade Journal With the Portfolio View

A trade journal only works if keeping it is easy enough to actually do after a long session — the moment logging trades feels like extra work on top of trading, it stops happening. Building it around data the terminal already tracks removes most of that friction.

Start from the Portfolio view, not a blank page

Padre Terminal's portfolio view already tracks realized and unrealized PnL, cost basis, and fees paid per position. Rather than manually recording entry and exit prices in a separate document, use this as your source data and add the one thing it doesn't capture on its own: why you made the trade.

What's worth adding manually

• What you saw — the specific reason you entered, in a sentence, not a paragraph.
• What size tier it was — standard, reduced, or increased, per our sizing framework — so you can later check whether sizing tracked conviction the way you intended.
• Whether you followed your own plan — a simple yes/no on whether the trade matched your preset and exit plan, separate from whether it made money.

Reviewing it later

The value of a journal shows up weeks in, not on day one — reading back through entries eventually surfaces patterns that aren't visible from inside any single session: sizes that were consistently wrong for the setup, exits that were consistently too early or too late, or specific conditions where your plan reliably broke down.

Why this beats memory

Without a record, it's easy to remember the trades that worked and vaguely explain away the ones that didn't. A journal built from actual portfolio data removes that selective memory — the numbers are what they are, independent of how the session felt at the time.