My trading journal template came about after reading "Trading in the Zone" by Mark Douglas. One of the suggestions in his book is to keep a trading journal of all of your operations in the market so that you may perform a post analysis of exactly what you did and why you did it. He stressed the importance of recording this information as soon as possible, preferably immediately. The reason is because the longer we wait to record our decisions, the more time we give ourselves to justify them. A good journal will capture your actions as close to raw as possible. In designing my trading journal template, I opted to use Excel because it provided me with a large workspace where I can keep just about everything I wish to track, plan with, analyze, etc.. And the ability to use formulas to automate some of the processes and make it more efficient.