Building a Monday gap journal that you will actually keep
Five fields per open — gap type, width versus ATR, open auction note, decision, and one sentence of hindsight.
Journals fail when they ask for essays. For gap work we use five fields on a single line per symbol:
- Type — common, breakaway, runaway, exhaustion, or “unclear”
- Width — gap points divided by fourteen-day ATR, as a rough ratio
- Auction — one phrase: held, filled early, delayed fill, or abandoned
- Decision — trade, watch, or stand aside
- Hindsight — one sentence written after the close, not during the open
Private Chart Review sessions often start by scanning two weeks of these lines. Patterns appear quickly: unclear types cluster on Mondays after long weekends; stand-aside decisions that were overridden show up as the costly rows.
Print the template or keep it in a plain text file. Fancy spreadsheets are optional; consistency is not.