JOURNALING
A futures journal has to record contracts, tick value and fees per trade, not just entry and exit prices. Without the contract specification the same price move produces a different dollar result on ES than on NQ, so a log that stores only prices cannot tell you which trades actually made money.
By the Finotaur Team · Last updated: 27 July 2026
THE CORE PROBLEM
In equities, a dollar of price movement is a dollar per share. The arithmetic is direct, and most journal software was designed around it. Futures do not work that way: a one-point move is $50 on ES, $20 on NQ, $50 on RTY and $1,000 on CL. The price change alone tells you nothing about the money.
This produces a specific failure. A log that records a 10-point winner on NQ and a 10-point winner on ES as comparable trades is comparing $200 against $500. Any statistic built on top of that — average win, expectancy, profit factor — inherits the error silently.
The fix is to store the contract specification with the trade, not to convert to dollars and forget how you got there. Once quantity, tick size, tick value and fees are recorded per trade, every downstream statistic computes correctly and you can still see the price behaviour underneath.
The tell that a journal is doing share-based math on futures is a P&L that disagrees with your broker statement by a consistent multiple, or a mixed-contract account where the equity curve looks right but per-trade averages look implausible.
WHAT TO RECORD
Most trade logs record what happened. Fewer record what was intended, and that difference is what makes review possible. A log of outcomes tells you that you lost; a log that also holds the intended stop and intended risk tells you whether you lost because the idea was wrong or because you did not follow it.
The fields below split into three groups: what the broker knows, what only you know, and what you can only capture at the time.
| Group | Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Execution | Symbol and contract month | Specs and liquidity differ across contracts and expiries. |
| Execution | Quantity in contracts | Without it, dollar results cannot be derived from price. |
| Execution | Entry and exit fills, with timestamps | Averaged fills hide scaling behaviour and slippage. |
| Execution | Commissions and exchange fees | On short holds these are a material share of the result. |
| Intent | Planned stop price | The only way to compute R and to see whether the stop was honoured. |
| Intent | Intended dollar risk | Recorded at entry. Reconstructing it later is guesswork. |
| Intent | Strategy or setup name | Makes per-strategy performance separable from overall P&L. |
| Context | Session and time of day | Behaviour and liquidity differ enough to change results by session. |
| Context | Screenshot at entry | The only durable record of what the chart looked like when you decided. |
| Context | Note on why you took it | Written before the outcome is known, this is the highest-value field in the log. |
R MULTIPLES
An R multiple expresses a result as a ratio of the risk taken. A trade that risked $200 and made $400 is +2R. One that risked $50 and made $100 is also +2R. In dollars they look unrelated; in R they are the same trade, executed at different size.
This matters most for futures traders because size and instrument both vary. Comparing a two-contract ES trade against a five-contract MNQ trade in dollars compares sizing decisions, not the quality of the trades. In R, the sizing cancels out and what remains is whether the idea worked.
It also exposes a pattern dollars hide: a strategy with a good win rate and a poor average R is losing money on the arithmetic of its exits, not on entry selection. That distinction changes what you would work on, and it is invisible in a dollar-denominated log.
The one prerequisite is that R has to be computed against the risk you actually took. If the stop was moved, or if there was no stop, R is either undefined or has to be marked as estimated. A journal that quietly substitutes a default is producing numbers that look precise and are not.
Entry to stop in ticks, times tick value, times contracts. The initial stop, not the one you moved it to.
It should be flagged rather than assigned a number. Averaging estimated R with real R produces a statistic that is not measuring anything.
Average R across all trades tells you what one unit of risk returns on average. It is comparable across instruments, across size, and across time.
REVIEW
The most common failure of trade journaling is not incomplete data. It is a complete log that is never reviewed, which produces all of the effort and none of the benefit.
A review that works is short and has a question. Weekly, group the log by strategy and by session, and ask one thing: where is the money actually being lost. Not which trades felt bad — which grouping has negative expectancy. Those are frequently different answers, and only one of them is actionable.
The second question worth asking regularly is whether intended risk matched actual risk. A systematic gap between the two is a discipline problem that shows up in the log long before it shows up in the account, and it is the specific thing a review can catch early.
If a connected broker fills the execution fields automatically, the only manual work left is intent and context. That is roughly thirty seconds per trade, and it is the part no automation can supply because it is what was in your head at the time.
STEP BY STEP
Manual entry loses fills, averages partials and drops fees. A connected account gets symbol, contracts, fills, timestamps and commissions exactly as they occurred.
Both must be written before the outcome is known. This is the pair that makes R computable and makes discipline measurable.
Without a label, per-strategy performance cannot be separated and the log can only tell you about the account as a whole.
Written at entry, before you know how it ends. This is the field that makes a review find causes rather than restate outcomes.
Contracts, tick size, tick value and fees. Check the journal's dollar result against your broker statement once to confirm the math agrees.
Group and look for negative expectancy in R, not for individual bad trades. One trade is noise; a grouping is a finding.
FAQ
The execution details the broker knows, which are symbol, contract month, quantity in contracts, individual fills with timestamps and fees; your intent, which is the planned stop, the intended dollar risk and the strategy name; and context, which is the session, a screenshot and a one-line note on why you took the trade. The intent fields are the ones that make review possible.
Record the raw fills and the contract specification, then let the journal derive all three. Storing only one loses information: dollars alone hide the price behaviour, and points alone cannot be compared across contracts because a point is worth a different amount on every instrument.
An R multiple expresses a result as a ratio of the risk taken, so a trade that risked $200 and made $400 is +2R. For futures it matters because both size and instrument vary between trades. In dollars, a two-contract ES trade and a five-contract MNQ trade are not comparable; in R the sizing cancels out and what remains is whether the idea worked.
It is the distance from entry to the initial stop in ticks, multiplied by the tick value, multiplied by the number of contracts. The initial stop is the correct input, not a stop that was moved later, because R is meant to measure the risk you accepted when you entered.
The usual cause is that the journal is applying share-based arithmetic to futures, ignoring the contract multiplier, or omitting commissions and exchange fees. A consistent multiple between the two figures points at the multiplier; a small consistent gap usually points at fees.
Weekly is enough for most traders, and more useful than daily because a single session is mostly noise. Review by grouping rather than by individual trade: look at expectancy in R per strategy and per session, and check whether intended risk matched actual risk. Both questions are answerable in a few minutes and neither is visible in the equity curve.