Day trading journal template: what to log
Founder of TradeStack. Builds the importer and reviews every broker export format by hand.
Log date, symbol, side, size, entry, exit, fees, realized P&L, setup tag and one note per trade. Per day, log total P&L, number of trades, and whether you followed your rules.
Per-trade fields
Date and time, symbol, long or short, quantity, entry price, exit price, commissions and fees, realized P&L, setup or playbook tag, and a one-line reason for the entry. Everything else is optional decoration.
Per-day fields
Total realized P&L, number of trades, best and worst trade, whether you followed your rules, and your mental state. Rule adherence is the field most traders skip and the one that predicts drawdowns.
The weekly review routine
Once a week, group trades by setup tag and compute expectancy per setup. Keep positive-expectancy setups, cut the rest. Then check whether your worst days share a time of day, symbol or emotional state.
Template vs app
A spreadsheet template works until you have a few hundred trades. An app calculates win rate, profit factor and expectancy per tag automatically, which is where the actual insight lives.
Frequently asked
How detailed should each entry be?
One line of reasoning beats a paragraph you will never write. Consistency matters more than depth.
Should I screenshot every trade?
Screenshot the outliers: your best and worst trades. Those are where the pattern is.
Is there a free template?
TradeStack gives you the template as a working app: log or import trades and every field above is captured for free.
Sources
Keep reading
TradeStack is a free trading journal. Drop in a CSV and get win rate, profit factor and expectancy automatically.
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