Screenshots are not a session record
How screenshot folders pretend to be price action journals — and what to put on the page instead.
A folder of marked-up charts feels productive. It rarely answers the questions that matter after a rough week: What did you believe before entry? What level mattered? Did you follow your own invalidation?
Screenshots freeze an image. A price action journal freezes a decision context. You can keep both — many of our traders attach one chart to a written page — but the writing comes first.
Minimum fields that earn the name “journal”
- Prior structure (range, break, unfinished business)
- Levels with reasons
- Planned invalidation
- What you did
- What the print did relative to the plan
- One note on attention quality (optional, but revealing)
If filling those fields takes longer than your session, the template is too heavy. Mentoring often begins by cutting sections, not adding them.
Brisbane desk days
When traders sit together at our George Street office, the contrast is obvious: people with screenshot archives speak in retrospectives; people with written pages can defend a pre-market sentence. That is the bar we coach toward.