A trading journal is the record of your trading: every trade with what you planned, what you did, what happened and what was going on around it. A broker statement tells you that you lost $400 on Tuesday; a journal tells you it was a FOMO entry in the New York afternoon after two losses, and that this combination has cost you money nine times out of ten.

What to record for each trade

Group Fields
Basics date and time, market, direction, size
Plan setup, entry, stop, target, risk
Execution fills, exit, fees, MAE and MFE
Result net P&L, R-multiple
Context session, setup quality, checklist, emotion, mistakes, a note and a screenshot

Only a few fields are essential; the rest are what make the analysis possible later.

What a journal shows

  • Which setups have a positive expectancy and which do not.
  • Which sessions, markets and days work for you.
  • What your mistakes cost in money (mistake cost).
  • How your state (sleep, stress, tilt) affects your results.

Spreadsheet or app?

A spreadsheet is free and flexible until the first partial exit, the first import, or the first time you want results by session and setup at once. A journal app computes the metrics from your fills and keeps the definitions consistent. The Excel versus app article lists where a spreadsheet breaks.

In SetupBook

SetupBook is a free trading journal for forex, crypto, futures and stocks. Only symbol, direction and result are required; prices, stop and size let it compute P&L, risk and R for you, and MetaTrader, Binance and TradingView history can be imported. The user guide walks through every screen.