NOTES ON SWING TRADING.

Two numbers that tell you whether you are exiting too early, holding losers too long, or putting your stop in the wrong place.

Win rate on its own is close to meaningless. Expectancy is the one number that says whether an edge exists.

A one-line ratio that says how many dollars you made for every dollar you lost — and the benchmarks that are actually realistic.

Win rate and risk/reward are two halves of one number. Optimising either alone is how profitable-looking strategies lose money.

Your own filled trades are the cleanest dataset you will ever have for testing an exit. Here is how to use them.

Every broker buries this in a different place and calls it something different. Here is where to look.

Most templates record what happened. The fields that change behaviour are the ones about why, and there are fewer of them than you would think.

Size is arithmetic, not opinion. The only genuine judgement call is the risk percentage — and there is a way to derive even that.

The difference is not how aggressive you are. It is holding period — and everything that follows from it.

The same setup, traded identically, can be a good strategy and a bad one depending on nothing but the tape around it.

Seven entries, each defined precisely enough that you could tag a trade with it and measure whether it works for you.

Entries get all the attention. The exit is where the money in a swing trade is actually decided.

Risk the least when you know the least. Add size only once the market has started paying you for being right.

You can scale exposure without touching your position size. Change how many trades you are in.

What actually separates a swing trading journal from a day trading one — and an honest accounting of where ours fits.

Halve the stop and you double the shares for the same dollar risk. Your win rate does not halve with it — and that gap is the whole opportunity.

Six journals, what each is best at, and a feature-by-feature table.