A free trading journal that shows you why you lose
Most traders log entries and exits and learn nothing. This journal records the decision behind each trade — the setup, the rule you followed or broke, the emotion at the time — and turns a few weeks of that into a picture of where your money actually goes.
Your workspace is private. Sharing means inviting a member, never a public link.
What is a trading journal?
A trading journal is a record of every position you take, kept in enough detail that you can later separate the trades that lost money from the decisions that lost money. Those are not the same thing: a correctly executed trade can lose, and a rule you broke can still win.
The minimum useful entry is the instrument, direction, size, entry, stop, target and exit — from which risk and R-multiple follow. What makes a journal worth keeping is the second half: which strategy the trade belonged to, whether you followed your checklist, and what you were feeling. Without those columns you have a statement, not a journal.
The point of the exercise is the review. After 50 to 100 trades the aggregate tells you things no single trade can: which setup carries your account, which one you keep trading out of boredom, what your results look like on the days you deviate from plan.
What's inside
Everything below exists today. Nothing here is a roadmap item.
Calendar with daily P&L
Every trading day coloured by result, with a weekly summary column. Open a day to read the notes you wrote, attach a screenshot of the chart, and see the trades behind the number.
Equity curve and yearly heatmap
Your account balance over time, plus a year-at-a-glance heatmap that makes losing streaks and seasonal slumps obvious.
R-multiples, not just P&L
Risk amount and R-multiple are computed per trade from your entry, stop and size, so a good trade sized small and a lucky trade sized big stop looking identical.
Strategy breakdown
Group results by the strategy tag you assign. This is the report that usually ends an argument with yourself about which setup deserves your capital.
Emotional heatmap
Log the emotion and the mistake on each trade and see them plotted against outcome. Revenge trades and boredom trades have a shape, and it shows up fast.
Pre-trade checklist
Define the conditions a setup must meet, tick them before you enter, and later filter results by whether the checklist was complete.
Trade explorer with CSV export
Sort and filter every trade by date, symbol, P&L or R-multiple, and export the whole table to CSV whenever you want your data elsewhere.
News overlay
See scheduled economic events against your trading days, so a bad session gets attributed to the news it ran into rather than to a vague hunch.
Multiple accounts
Track real, prop, demo and paper accounts separately in one workspace, and mirror a trade to another account with proportional sizing.
Team workspaces
Invite members as editor or viewer, with a leaderboard, a combined equity curve and shared case studies — built for trading groups and prop desks.
Journal app or Excel template?
A spreadsheet is a perfectly good place to start, and for the first 30 trades it is arguably better: you decide the columns, and typing them teaches you what you care about. Most traders search for a trading journal template first for exactly that reason.
What a template does not do is compute R-multiples consistently, keep an emotional heatmap next to a strategy breakdown, hold screenshots per day, or stay in sync when you trade three accounts. That is the point where a spreadsheet turns into maintenance work instead of analysis.
If you already have a spreadsheet, nothing here traps your data: the trade explorer exports everything to CSV on demand, so moving out is one click. There is no automatic MT5 import today — trades are entered manually, which for most journals is a feature, since the typing is where the reflection happens.
For prop-firm traders
Funded-account rules punish the things a journal exposes. Daily and maximum drawdown, consistency requirements and minimum trading days all depend on behaviour you can only see in aggregate.
Keep the challenge account as its own account inside the workspace, tag every trade with the setup, and after the first failed attempt you will have the one thing most retried challenges lack: a specific reason. In our experience the answer is rarely the strategy — it is size after a loss, or trading on the days the plan said to sit out.
How to start
Create a free account
The journal shares login with the rest of the site. If you already bought anything from EV Trading Labs, you have an account.
Add your accounts
One workspace, as many accounts as you trade: real, prop, demo or paper, each with its own currency and starting balance.
Log trades and review weekly
Enter each trade with its strategy, emotion and checklist. Read the calendar and the strategy breakdown once a week — that review is where the value is.
Use it with
Frequently asked questions
Is this trading journal free?
Yes. The journal is free to use with an EV Trading Labs account — no card, no trial timer. You need an account because a journal is private data: workspaces are shared by inviting a member, never by publishing a public URL.
What is a trading journal and why keep one?
It is a record of every position with enough context to review the decision, not just the result: instrument, direction, size, entry, stop, exit, plus the strategy, the checklist you followed and the emotion at the time. Kept for 50 to 100 trades it tells you which setup actually carries your account and which behaviour costs you money — questions no individual trade can answer.
What should I record in a trading journal?
At minimum: date, instrument, direction, position size, entry, stop loss, take profit and exit, which give you risk and R-multiple. Then the part that makes it useful: the strategy or setup name, whether your pre-trade checklist was complete, the emotion you traded on, and the mistake if there was one. A screenshot of the chart at entry is worth more than a paragraph of notes.
Can I use it as a day trading or forex journal?
Yes. Instruments are free text, so forex pairs, indices, futures, metals, crypto and stocks all work, and point value is set per trade so P&L and R-multiples come out right on any of them. Multiple accounts let you keep a day-trading account separate from a swing account.
Does it connect to MT5 automatically?
Not today. Trades are entered manually and exported to CSV. Manual entry is slower on purpose for most journal users — the few seconds of typing are where the review actually happens — but automatic import is the most requested addition.
Can I export my data?
Yes, at any time. The trade explorer exports the full table to CSV, including strategy, tags, R-multiple and P&L, so your history is never locked in.
Can my trading group share one journal?
Yes. A workspace takes members as editor or viewer, and the team panel adds a leaderboard, a combined equity curve and case studies built from real trades. Invites go to people with an account — there is no public share link.
Do I need a journal if I trade an EA?
Yes, and arguably more. Automated systems fail in ways that look fine trade by trade: a regime change, a broker spread widening, an EA left running through news. Logging the system's trades with the market context is how you notice the degradation before the drawdown tells you.
Your next 50 trades are either data or a blur.
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