The minimum viable journal logs: entry date, ticker, strategy, strikes, expiration, IV rank at entry, thesis in one sentence, max risk in dollars, planned exit, actual exit, P&L, and a one-line post-mortem. Most useful column: the gap between planned exit and actual exit. That single comparison reveals whether you follow your own rules — and unfollowed rules are the root cause of most account failures.
Review weekly, not daily. Daily review amplifies emotion and recency bias. Weekly review across 5–10 trades surfaces real patterns: the strategies you over-trade when bored, the times of day when your fills slip, the IV environments where your edge is real versus imaginary. The journal is the only audit trail that lets you separate skill from luck.