The Day Trading Journal That Shows Which Sessions and Setups Work
Log every intraday trade with session, setup and confluence tags. Mistake Cost Analysis, overtrading detection and 60+ analytics views break down your day trading performance by session, setup and confluence — identifying revenge trades, overexposure and repeating mistakes by net P&L. Free to start. Updated 12 October 2026.
What is a day trading journal?
A day trading journal is a log of every intraday trade with the context a day trader needs to review it: the session, the setup, how many trades you took that day, how long you held and whether you followed your plan. It shows which sessions and setups pay, and when you overtrade.
The free .xlsx template for day traders is further down.
Day trading generates a high volume of trades — which means a lot of data, but also a lot of noise. The most common day trading mistakes — overtrading in slow conditions, revenge trading after a loss, holding past your target — only become visible when you have enough tagged trades to see the pattern. A day trading journal needs to capture session, setup and behavioural context on every trade, not just entry and exit.
The Trading Terminal's analytics layer is built specifically for high-frequency review. Overtrading detection flags sessions where your trade count is abnormally high and performance is below average. Revenge-trade detection identifies trades taken within a short window after a loss. Mistake Cost Analysis adds up the net P&L of trades carrying specific mistake tags — moving stops, chasing entries, ignoring session rules. With 60+ analytics views and Trader DNA breaking results by session, setup and direction, you get a complete picture of where your intraday edge is and where it isn't.
What You Get
Trade Journal
Log every trade with entry, exit, R:R, setup tags, confluences, screenshots, emotion ratings and trade grading. CSV import included.
60+ Analytics Views
Mistake Cost Analysis, Trader DNA, 0–100 Edge Score, setup win rate, session performance, confluence charts and more.
Risk Desk
Daily risk budget, distance-to-breach bars with alerts at 70% and 90%, trailing drawdown tracking. Works on live, demo and prop firm accounts.
Trade Lab
Named strategy tracking with best conditions and danger zones. Compare multiple strategies side by side.
Built for Every Account Type, Including Prop Firms
Intraday trading on any account can run into a daily loss limit within a single session. Risk Desk calculates your remaining daily risk budget from your closed trades and shows distance-to-breach bars that update as you log trades. Alerts appear at 70% and 90% consumed. Do Not Trade danger zones can flag sessions or market conditions where your own history shows consistent losses.
What should a day trading journal track?
A swing trader can get by on a few fields. A day trader takes enough trades that the order and timing of them start to matter, so the journal needs a few things a general log leaves out:
| Field | Why a day trader needs it |
|---|---|
| Trade number for the day | Results often change after the third or fourth trade of a session; you can only see it if the position in the day is recorded |
| Session and entry time | The Trading Terminal fills the session in from your entry time and timezone, so you do not have to type it |
| Setup | One name from a fixed list, so ten trades with the same label really are the same trade |
| Planned and actual R:R | Shows whether you take profit where you planned to or earlier |
| Minutes in trade | Separates quick scalps from trades you let breathe |
| Plan followed? and mistake tag | Marks the trades that broke your rules, so their total can be counted |
| Daily result against your daily stop | The line between a bad day and a day that got out of hand |
The P&L calendar on the dashboard shows the number of trades and the net result for each day, which makes the days with an unusual number of trades easy to find.
Which mistakes does a day trading journal catch?
Most day trading damage comes from a short list of habits. Each one needs a tag on the trade, or it stays a feeling:
- Overtrading. Taking trades after your plan said to stop, or in a session you do not trade well. Tag it Over-traded and the net P&L of those trades becomes a number.
- Revenge trading. A trade taken quickly after a loss to win it back. The time gap between a loss and the next entry is visible in the journal; the Revenge Trade tag counts them.
- Size creep. Raising size after a win or a loss. Logging risk on every trade shows it as a drift in R.
- Moving the stop. A stop dragged further away turns a planned 1R loss into something larger. Moved SL counts how often.
- Chasing the open. Entering because price is moving rather than because the setup appeared.
Mistake Cost Analysis (Pro) adds up the net P&L of the trades carrying each tag. It describes what those trades produced; it does not estimate what they would have made without the mistake.
What does one day of day trading look like in the journal?
Here is one fictional day. The plan was to stop after three trades or at -2R. The table shows what the journal reveals once the trade number and the tags are recorded. Risk was $100 per trade.
| # | Time | Setup | Result | Running P&L | Plan followed? | Mistake tag |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 09:40 | Breakout | +$210 | +$210 | Yes | — |
| 2 | 10:15 | Pullback | -$100 | +$110 | Yes | — |
| 3 | 10:50 | Pullback | +$95 | +$205 | Yes | — |
| 4 | 11:20 | Breakout | -$100 | +$105 | No: plan said stop after 3 | Over-traded |
| 5 | 11:45 | Reversal | -$100 | +$5 | No: plan said stop after 3 | Revenge Trade |
| 6 | 12:30 | Breakout | -$100 | -$95 | No: plan said stop after 3 | Over-traded |
Stopping after trade 3 would have left the day at +$205. Because the next three trades broke the plan, the day finished at -$95, and the three tagged trades cost $300 between them. That is the kind of finding a daily total hides and a trade-by-trade journal shows. The numbers are invented to show the method.
Over a month, the same view answers a sharper question: how do your first three trades of the day compare with everything after them?
Is there a free day trading journal?
There are two free routes. The Trading Terminal's Free plan costs A$0 with no card: the complete trade journal, the dashboard with the P&L calendar, and CSV import and export for 1 account, with a cap of 30 trades per calendar month and 90 days of dashboard history. Be realistic about the cap: a day trader taking several trades a session will reach 30 within days, and unlimited trades are on Pro (A$19 a month or A$189 a year). The Analytics page and Mistake Cost Analysis are also Pro.
The other route has no cap. The free day trading journal template is an Excel workbook built for intraday review. It numbers each trade within the day, records minutes in trade and a plan-followed check, and its Summary sheet shows results by session, setup and plan-followed, trading days logged, the average number of trades per day and the net P&L of the trades you tagged with a mistake.
Download the day trading journal template (.xlsx)
Free, no sign-up, no macros. Row 6 is a fictional NAS100 trade: overwrite it. In Google Sheets use File > Import > Upload. The general trading journal template and the free trading journal page cover the other options.