Trading journal

What a trading journal is and why you stall without one

A trading journal is a systematic record of every position: instrument, direction, entry, exit, SL, TP, lot size, result in R, reason for entry, emotion before and after, and a chart screenshot. It sounds like bureaucracy until you see your first report: 70% of your yearly loss comes from trades opened within 30 minutes of a loss. You can't see that on your account balance. You can only see it in a trade journal.

Your broker gives you history, not conclusions. MT5 shows deals, cTrader shows an order list, a crypto exchange shows fills. None of them answers 'are my entries after the London open profitable' or 'how much is skipping my stop-loss costing me'. A trading journal is the layer that turns raw tickets into decisions: what to keep doing, and what to stop doing immediately.

We built TradeLogic as the journal that does the boring part for you: connect your broker once and every closed trade lands in your journal with commission and swap attached. AI analytics reads your own history and flags revenge trades, missing stops and oversized positions — in plain language, not in charts you have to decode.

Want to understand the topic from the ground up first — what to record, which metrics to compute and which mistakes to avoid? Read our guide: what a trading journal is and how to keep one Step by step, with examples.

What to record in a trade journal (the minimum that works)

You don't need 40 fields. You need a handful that you fill in every time. The set below starts producing clear conclusions after about 50 closed positions — and TradeLogic fills in most of it automatically after auto-import.

• Technical data. Instrument, direction, entry, exit, SL, TP, position size, commission and swap. This flows in automatically from MT4/MT5/cTrader/OANDA or from CSV.
• R-multiple. Result measured in multiples of risk, not dollars. +2R at 0.5% risk and +2R at 3% are two different stories — R lets you compare them.
• Setup / playbook. A named strategy (e.g. 'London breakout', 'flag break'). Without tags you can only compute expectancy per account, not per strategy.
• Reason for entry. One sentence. If you can't write it, it wasn't a setup — it was a click.
• Emotion and mistake. FOMO, revenge, no SL, oversized lot, overtrading — one tap. This feeds the Mistakes Tracker and Tilt Meter.
• Screenshot. The chart at the moment of entry. In three months your memory will lie to you; the picture won't.

Metrics worth watching (and the ones that mislead)

Win rate alone says nothing. A strategy with 35% winners and 1:3 R:R earns more than 70% winners at 1:0.5. That's why the first number you see in TradeLogic is expectancy — the average result in R per trade. Positive expectancy means the system earns; the rest is position sizing and discipline.

The second number is drawdown, split into two different things: equity drawdown (the dip of your equity curve) and account drawdown (the dip relative to prop firm rules). Traders mix these two up and that's why they blow FTMO accounts even though 'the curve looked fine'.

The third group is distributions: result per instrument, per session (London / New York / Asia), per weekday, per hour and per setup. Almost every trader has one clearly negative window in these distributions. Removing just that window is often enough to stop the account bleeding — and it's the cheapest 'strategy' you'll ever buy for $4.99.

Trading journal in Excel vs an app

Excel is free and that's its only advantage. In return it costs you about four hours a month at 60 trades: copying, recalculating, fixing formulas, building the equity chart. After week two you skip one session, after a month the sheet is stale, after a quarter you stop opening it. We know — that's how we started.

An app solves a different problem than convenience: data completeness. Auto-import never forgets. When your trade journal holds 100% of positions instead of the 70% you felt like remembering, the conclusions suddenly stop being flattering — and that's exactly when they become useful. On top of that you get things a spreadsheet can't do: AI analytics, Trade Cycle, Tilt Meter, Monte Carlo for your challenge and one-click reports.

TradeLogic vs Excel, TradeZella and TraderSync

It's not that TradeZella or TraderSync are bad. It's that you pay them $29–$39 a month and still don't get native cTrader sync, prop firm rule tracking or a real free tier.

How it works in TradeLogic — 3 steps

1. 1

   Connect your account (5 minutes)

   MT4/MT5 via our sync EA, cTrader and OANDA via OAuth, crypto via read-only API keys. Up to 5 years of history backfills in one click.

2. 2

   Add context (30 seconds per trade)

   Trade Cycle walks you through the stages: journal → screenshot → emotion → review. You don't have to remember what to ask yourself.

3. 3

   Read conclusions, not numbers

   AI analytics summarizes your week: what earned, what burned the account, which rule was broken and what to change next week.

How much you save

Plus cash savings: $4.99/mo for TradeLogic PRO vs $39 for TradeZella is about $410 less per year. The Free plan ($0 forever) is enough to test auto-import and statistics without a card.

FAQ — frequently asked questions

See also

• MT5 trading journal

  Auto-import from MetaTrader 5 in 5 minutes — no copying into Excel.

• AI trading analytics

  AI reads your trades and tells you what actually breaks your results.

• Prop Firm Tracker

  Daily Loss and Max DD live for FTMO, FundedNext and 10 more firms.

• Auto-import

  Every broker, one journal — fills sync between trades.

• Position size calculator

  Lot size at 0.5% and 1% risk — no sign-up needed.

• TradeLogic — homepage

  The full trading journal: auto-import, AI analytics, prop firms.