How to Build a Tagging System That Actually Improves Your Trading

Tagging trades in your trading journal is one of the most effective ways to uncover strengths and weaknesses in your trading approach. In fact, it’s one of the very first habits you should build when starting to journal. But the common question new traders face is: how do you tag trades in the most useful way?

The key is to start simple and gradually increase the level of detail as you gain experience. By keeping your tagging structure simple in the beginning, your categories fill up faster and provide meaningful insights much sooner. For example, if you only use three entry tags—good, bad, neutral—each category will accumulate data quickly. On the other hand, if you begin with six or eight different tags, it will take far longer before you have enough trades in each category to draw reliable conclusions.

A great first step is to separate trades where you followed your rules from those where you broke them. This immediately creates awareness around the quality of your trading, not just the outcome. Each time you enter a trade in your broker platform, ask yourself which tag it deserves in your Edgewonk trading journal. That simple pause builds awareness, and awareness is always the first step toward meaningful behavioral change.

Once you’ve logged around 30 to 50 trades, you can decide if it makes sense to go deeper. Instead of tagging a trade simply as a “rule violation,” you might specify how you broke the rule: Was it an early entry? A late entry? Or perhaps a completely impulsive trade outside your strategy? This level of detail helps you identify patterns in your mistakes and create frameworks to address your biggest weaknesses.

That said, detailed tagging can be challenging for newer traders who may not yet have the awareness to pinpoint exact errors. This is why we recommend starting with a simple tagging structure. As you become more comfortable with journaling and begin to see its benefits, you can slowly expand your system to capture more nuance in your trading behavior.