Online Trading Journal and Trade Log for Every Account Type
The short answer
A trading journal records every trade you take, plus the thinking behind it, so you can judge your results by evidence rather than memory. Log the trade (instrument, entry, exit, size, result) and its context (setup, session, mistakes, how you felt) the same way each time, then review it every week.
Guide by Harrison Weaver. Go straight to: free trading journal, trading journal software, trading journal app, trading journal template, what to write in a trading journal, trading journal examples.
What Is a Trading Journal? Trading Log vs Trading Diary
A trading journal is a record of every trade you take, kept so you can review your performance instead of relying on memory. At its simplest, it's a trade tracker — a place that logs entry, exit, size and outcome for each trade. But a spreadsheet that only records those fields tells you what happened, not why. A serious trading journal needs to capture the context around each trade — the setup, the session, the confluences that lined up, any mistakes made, and how you felt going into it — so that months of trades become a dataset you can actually learn from, not just a list of numbers.
That distinction matters more the longer you trade. A trade tracker with 20 entries doesn't tell you much. The same tracker with 500 entries, tagged consistently, can tell you exactly which setup makes you money, which session drains it, and which single mistake tag has the lowest total net P&L.
Why keep a trading journal?
Memory is a poor record of trading. A big win or a painful loss stays vivid, while the ordinary trades that make up most of your results blur together, so a trader's sense of how they are doing tends to differ from the numbers. A journal replaces that impression with a count.
It does four jobs:
- It shows patterns. The same mistake or the same weak session can repeat for weeks unnoticed. Tagged trades make the repeat visible.
- It keeps you accountable to your own rules. Writing the plan before the trade makes any departure from it obvious afterwards.
- It separates decisions from outcomes. A well-executed trade can lose and a sloppy one can win. Grading execution on its own keeps you from learning the wrong lesson.
- It tracks risk. Position size, daily loss and drawdown drift without anyone deciding to let them. A journal shows whether you risk what you think you risk.
A journal does not make a strategy profitable, and it does not tell you what to trade. It gives you accurate information about your own history, which is the raw material for any improvement.
What types of trading journal are there?
There are four common formats. None is correct for everyone; the right one is the one you will keep updating.
| Format | Cost | Effort per trade | Analysis | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paper notebook | Free | Slowest: handwriting | Only what you tally by hand | Hard to search; screenshots must be printed |
| Spreadsheet | Free | Type each row | Formulas you build, or a ready-made template | Breaks as the trade count grows |
| Journal software | Free plans and paid plans | Forms, tags and imports | Calculated for you | Plan limits on trades, accounts and history |
| Journal app | Free plans and paid plans | Quick entries on a phone | Depends on the product | Check export, and whether it needs a connection |
If you want to start in a spreadsheet, the free trading journal template has working formulas. If you want imports and automatic breakdowns, trading journal software does that work, and a trading journal app lets you log from your phone. The free trading journal page lists what you get at no cost, including the limits.
The Minimum Fields Every Entry Needs
A journal entry needs to answer one question months later: why did I take this trade, and how did I execute it? These fields cover it:
- Instrument and direction
- Entry and exit price
- Position size and account size at entry
- Stop loss and take profit levels
- R:R, planned and actual
- Setup name, from your fixed setup list
- Session (London, New York, Asia or overlap)
- Confluences: what lined up for the entry
- Mistakes: any rules broken, such as early entry, moved stop or oversized position
- Emotion rating before entry and discipline rating after exit
- A screenshot of the setup and the result
- Notes on what you noticed and what you would do differently
The list looks long, but most fields are single-click tags once your setup and instrument lists exist. Notes are the only open-text field, and a couple of sentences is enough.
What does a trading journal entry look like?
A filled-in entry has four parts: the facts, the reason, the state you were in and a verdict on your execution. Here is one, with fictional numbers:
| Part | Entry |
|---|---|
| The facts | NAS100, long, 6 Jan 2026. Entry 17,420, stop 17,400, exit 17,462. Risk $100, net $210, +2.1R |
| The reason | Setup: Breakout. Session: New York. Confluence: retest of the opening range |
| The state | Emotion 4 of 5, discipline 5 of 5 |
| The verdict | Followed the plan, no mistake tag, grade A. Note: waited for the retest; no stop changes |
More samples, including a losing trade, a skipped trade and a worked ten-trade review, are in trading journal examples, and the prompts behind each field are in what to write in a trading journal.
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.
Analytics
60+ analytics views — Mistake Cost Analysis, setup performance, confluence win-rate, daily/weekly/monthly P&L and more.
Trader DNA
Performance breakdowns by instrument, session, setup, direction, timeframe and grade. Edge Score 0–100 gauge.
Risk Desk
Daily risk budget, distance to breach bars, trailing drawdown tracking and account rule tracking.
Why a Spreadsheet Isn't Enough
A spreadsheet can hold your trades, but it can't analyse them for you. Once you're past a couple hundred trades, manually filtering by setup, calculating win rate per session, or tallying up the net P&L of trades with each mistake tag becomes a project of its own — one most traders never finish, so the journal quietly stops getting updated.
The Trading Terminal does that analysis automatically. Mistake Cost Analysis shows the net P&L of every mistake you tag, so "I keep moving my stop loss" becomes a figure such as "trades tagged moving my stop loss netted -$2,400 this quarter" (an invented figure, for illustration only). Trader DNA breaks your results down by instrument, session, setup, direction and timeframe without you building a single pivot table. Edge Score rates your overall edge 0–100 from win rate, expectancy, drawdown control and rule adherence, so you have one number that tells you if you're actually improving. None of this requires formulas — you tag the trade once, and the breakdown happens on its own.
Trading Journal vs Spreadsheet vs Generic App
| The Trading Terminal | Spreadsheet | Generic Trading App | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | ✓ Full journal + dashboard (1 account, 30 trades a month) | ✓ Free, but manual | Often limited to a few trades |
| Analytics | ✓ 60+ analytics views | — Manual formulas only | Basic P&L charts only |
| Prop firm tools | ✓ Risk Desk, Do Not Trade | — | — |
| Broker sync | ✓ cTrader, MT4/MT5 (Elite) | — | Varies by app |
| Mistake tracking | ✓ Mistake Cost Analysis | — Manual tagging only | Rarely included |
How do you start a trading journal?
- Pick a format you will open. A spreadsheet you use today beats a perfect tool you set up next month.
- Write a short list of setups. Five to eight names, each specific enough to mean one thing.
- Decide the minimum fields and stop there. Add a field only when you have used the last one.
- Log every trade for thirty days before you judge anything. Include the losers and the trades you skipped.
- Put the weekly review in your calendar. A journal that is never reviewed is just a diary.
- Change one rule at a time. Date the change in your notes and compare before and after.
The Trading Terminal's Free plan is a place to start without paying: 1 account, up to 30 trades a month and 90 days of dashboard history, no card. See free trading journal for everything it includes.
Building a Setup Dictionary
Setup names are the most important part of a tagging system, because they let you filter a few hundred trades down to just the 40 "BOS+FVG London Open" trades and see how that setup has performed. Some principles that keep the data usable:
- Specific enough to mean one thing. "ICT setup" is too broad; if two trades with the same name look completely different on a chart, the name is too generic.
- Stable once set. Adding a version or sub-variant keeps the history for "Setup A" meaning the same thing, where renaming does not.
- Short enough to tag quickly. You tag right after a trade, so brief names get used.
- No outcome bias. Names like "A+ setup" frame how you log it before the data has a say.
Many traders write the list down before they start logging. A handful of distinct setups tends to be easier to review than thirty overlapping ones. The Setups & Confluences manager keeps these lists and feeds them into the journal form.
A Screenshot Workflow That Does Not Slow You Down
Screenshots improve review quality, but they get skipped if taking them is slow. One approach is two per trade, captured immediately: an entry screenshot taken as you enter, showing entry, stop, target and context, and an exit screenshot taken at close on the same chart. TradingView's screenshot tool gives a shareable link you can paste into the notes field, and each trade in The Trading Terminal also takes screenshot uploads (1 per trade on Free, 5 on Pro and Elite).
Why Most Traders Stop Journaling After a Couple of Weeks
The common reason is friction. If logging a trade takes five minutes of manual work, it feels like a chore the moment you are tired or frustrated, and the journal either stops or gets filled in later from memory, when the entries stop being accurate. The second reason is that a spreadsheet of 200 rows with no clear question to ask it is a record, not a feedback system.
Both are workable. For friction, pre-set your instrument, session and setup tags so an entry becomes a tagging exercise rather than a writing exercise. For analysis, a consistent tagging structure from the first trade means you can filter by setup, session and mistake when you review.
What mistakes make a trading journal useless?
- Logging only the trades you are proud of. The record then shows what worked and hides what did not.
- Filling it in days later. The reason for a trade is the first thing memory rewrites.
- Too many fields, or too few. Forty columns get abandoned; P&L alone has nothing to learn from.
- Setup names that change or mean everything. If two different trades share a name, the statistics for it are meaningless.
- Judging a setup on a handful of trades. Ten trades show a method, not a conclusion.
- Editing entries after you know the result. Hindsight turns the journal into a story.
- Logging without reviewing. The review is where the value is.
From Log to Learning: A Weekly Review Structure
Logging without reviewing is like recording a game and never watching it. A short weekly review is where a journal pays off. A review checklist could include:
- Filter last week's trades by setup and compare win rate and R:R per setup against your baseline.
- Look at the mistake tag with the lowest total net P&L for the week and what triggered it.
- Check session performance: which session was strongest, and whether you traded your weakest at all.
- Look for any pattern in where discipline ratings dropped.
- Review screenshots of your best and worst executions, sorted by execution quality rather than outcome.
Some traders keep the output to a couple of action items per review so the changes are specific. The weekly trading review article goes into the process, and how to build a trading journal covers the setup in more depth.
Which numbers should you review in a trading journal?
Six figures cover most of what a journal can tell you. All of them use closed trades.
| Measure | What it tells you | How it is worked out |
|---|---|---|
| Win rate | How often you win | Wins divided by wins, losses and break-evens together |
| Average win and average loss | The size of a typical outcome | Mean net P&L of the winners, and of the losers |
| Expectancy | The average result per trade | Win rate x average win, plus loss rate x average loss |
| Profit factor | Total won against total lost | Winning total divided by the absolute losing total |
| Results by setup and session | Where your results come from | The same measures, grouped by tag |
| Mistake tag totals | What rule-breaking added up to | Net P&L of the trades carrying each tag |
These are the definitions The Trading Terminal uses, published on how we calculate. A win rate on its own says little: a trader who wins half the time can be profitable if the average win is larger than the average loss, and the reverse.
Built for Every Account Type
The same journal works across live, demo, prop firm and backtest accounts. The Accounts manager keeps each account's trades, balance and rules separate, so a demo account's numbers never mix with a live one, and you can filter the journal and analytics by account. Backtest accounts let you log tested trades next to live ones without blending the results.
For accounts with loss limits, such as a prop firm evaluation or a funded account, Risk Desk calculates a daily risk budget from the loss limit you enter, shows Distance to Breach bars for daily loss and max drawdown, and tracks trailing drawdown from your closed trades. It works the same way on a live or demo account where you set your own limits. Do Not Trade lists conditions where your own results have been negative. Prop firm specifics are on the prop firm trading journal page.