Creating a catch-all thread for other traders. Share how you use Obsidian to aid in your growth as a trader… from Trading Journals, Daily Report Cards, Trade Reviews and everything in between.
The goal of this thread is to streamline/optimize the note-taking process so that traders can refocus on the charts themselves.
I tried input trade info (such as datetime, ticker, price, quantity, reason why this trade occurs) into daily notes. Then use dataview to assemble them in a tabular format.
Though it doesn’t make any sense with this experiment. It’s just a not too ugly way, to show the trading log to my audience (which is perhaps only me and myself).
I must continue with the spreadsheet app or dedicated app for trading journal purpose.
Yeah I reached the same conclusion myself regarding hard numbers and Obsidian. I’ve just started wrapping my head around Dataview this week and even though it rhymes w/ SQL, it’s not something I plan on using for extensive calculations. I think the gist of Dataview for my trading will be to populate my ‘End of Week Review’ templater doc w/ outstanding tasks within my daily notes.
If you’re looking to visualize your trading data and don’t mind going down a rabbit hole, I recommend giving Pandas a shot as a FOSS alternative. It’s replicatable and pretty and there are other templates floating around. I just did a quick GitHub search and this is a good example of its capabilities.
Related/unrelated but if you (or anyone reading) are unfamiliar w/ Pandas, this is a solid course I took from a great instructor (entertaining content and meaningful datasets like UFO sightings, La Liga, Pokemon, etc). Price should dip to $14 or so during the recognized US holidays.
I’m doing something like this:
Collecting trade specific data in frontmatter:
---
type: trading/journal
trade:
symbol: ABC
entry-date: 2023-11-28
shares: 100
entry-price: 110.00
stop-loss-price: 105.00
take-profit-price: 125.0
exit-date:
exit-price:
---
Let this show up in the note with help of the “Meta Bind Plugin”
EntryPrice: `VIEW[{trade.entry-price}]`
The nice thing is, you can paste images and write longer descriptions as in a Excel file. And you can have an overview of open trades with a dataview query.
But: for more statistics, calculations and so on I have a row in an Excel file additionally.
I only started using Frontmatter this week and I’m not sure I’ll be importing actual metrics but your use case is a good example of the structure it can provide!
One recommendation I have re: Trading Journal Notes is the Text Snippets plugin. It allows me to use shorthand phrases to insert text quickly. Here’s an example for GitHub:
I use it throughout my trade journal but my most frequent uses as of late are:
When u put trade data in frontmatter like that, does dataview can extract if u have multiple trade in a single day?
As for me, i tried with dataview inline tag and not nested structure
For example:
## Transaction log
ticker:: abc
orderType:: buy
price::
quantity::
datetime:: 2023-12-01T10:10:10
ticker:: xyz
orderType:: sell
price::
quantity::
datetime:: 2023-12-01T11:10:10
I have an extra note for every trade “2023-12-01_ABC” This is exactly the benefit: a full note for screenshots, text and so on. This is limited in an spreadsheet row.
And I link the trading note from within my daily note, so there is also a connection.
The overview is done with dataview in a note “Trading Journal”.
I have a back testing trade journal in Notion. one of the things I do is roll up a table into a Kanban/Card view to see all of the trades at once:
I don’t like Notion’s approach to privacy/personal data, so I’m trying to bring everything under one house, and I’ve been looking to replicate the setup in Obsidian. I have played around w/ dataloom last week and gave the new tables (Obsidian v1.5 went live this AM) try this morning, but neither quite fill the void.
I’m going to follow yalls lead and jump head first into dataview. I’m going to turn my trading checklist/market structure notes into prepopulated portions of the front matter and then I’ll just delete what doesn’t apply.
I know that I can create cards via Minimal theme w/ some CSS if need be, but for now, I will just settle for a workflow that for the most part ties into my existing setup w/ snippets.
Built out my frontmatter yesterday and making progress w/ a framework.
I just had an idea that has me really excited and thought I’d share w/ the class… it’s the ability to streamline my post-trade review. Instead of mindlessly going through all of my trades, I am going to grab samples of the extremes and deep dive into trades w/ similar results for patterns to exploit/avoid.
The logic is pretty simple in retrospect. I capture a lot of variables, but there are two specifically that will anchor my review:
They each get a score of 1-10. Simple enough. The plan is to then use DataView calculations to segment trades based on the differences between these two variables. Here are the categories I brainstormed (in order of importance):
Each category is its own separate document. There’s a philosophical, market profile trader called Chris Cady, and he has a saying that comes to mind… something to the effect of “trading is really just an exercise in data segmentation”. This feels like an extension of that idea, albeit outside of market hours but also inside the daily grind of trading. Can’t wait to put it to use and hope others can get something out of it too.
I went all in on Metadata Menu plugin. Feels like the right choice so far. Will share my setup once I build it out some more
Thank you for creating this thread. I was actually about to post my own “Any traders using, show how you use obsidian”
I’m quite new to obsidian, markdown relatively eh, scratchy at using it, just all about getting into the flow once more. I honestly, had been just bruteforcing down pre-market and post-market prices, and what I bought and sold at.
Need to dip my toes back into pandas now though, eh? Thank ya for the rabbit hole haha
I have been using the Metadata Menu Plugin + Text Snippets for faster data input thanks to prepopulated options :
Here is a video I created that illustrates how I can jump across fields easily using the tab button (thanks to Text Snippets) as well as pre-populated responses (Metadata Menu). The example shown is for deep dives into price action that’s hard to decipher but I use it throughout most of my trading journey, such as testing new variables. I’m actually less shy about tracking more variables since data input isn’t as tedious anymore.
Thank the lord for this thread. I’m actually going to be building somewhat of a simple trade journal to log my thoughts, trade setups and chart data.
Really loving the charts plugin for obsidian. We can almost create a little dashboard with our trade data, however making a template for it to be easy to input and edit data is how I want it setup.
If anyone is thinking about building a nice formulated journal happy to chat on this thread or discord.
I originally used Edgewonk 2, but it was a desktop version using Java and was rather clunky. Edgewonk 3 became a subscription service, which I intensely dislike. Obsidian isn’t going to be as powerful or feature rich as dedicated trading journal apps. It’s power and weakness both stem from it’s customization. You’ll have to design each moving part and you’ll likely end up spending more time on Obsidian than you will with charts. Having said that here’s a preview of what you can do using Dataview combined with Minimal Theme’s card feature. It’s rather unpolished and is missing features other basic trading journals have, so I’m not ready to share it (I also run an older version of Obsidian because the latest version broke something)
