Free Trading Journal Template: How to Journal Your Trades

Every consistently profitable trader I've met journals their trades. Every single one. Not because it's fun — it isn't — but because it's the only reliable way to find out what's actually working and what's quietly bleeding your account dry.

Most traders think they know their patterns. They think they know their strengths and weaknesses. They're almost always wrong. Memory is selective. You remember the big winners vividly and the slow bleed of mediocre trades fades into background noise. A journal doesn't have that bias. It shows you the truth whether you like it or not.

What to Track in Every Trade

A useful trading journal captures more than just entries and exits. Here's what you should be recording for every single trade.

The Basics

• Date and time — When you entered and exited. This lets you analyze which sessions and times of day produce your best results.
• Instrument — ES, NQ, MNQ, CL, or whatever you're trading.
• Direction — Long or short.
• Entry price and exit price — Your actual fills, not where you intended to get in.
• Stop loss placement — Where your stop was and why it was there.
• Position size — Number of contracts.
• P&L — The dollar result of the trade.

The Context

• Setup type — Give your setups names. "Opening range breakout," "failed breakdown," "VWAP reclaim," "trend continuation pullback." When you name your setups, you can filter your journal by setup type and see which ones are actually making you money over 50+ occurrences.
• Market conditions — Was the market trending, ranging, or choppy? Was it a high-volume day or a holiday session? Were there economic releases on the calendar? Context changes everything about whether a setup should work.
• Thesis — Why did you take this trade? Write one or two sentences before the trade about what you expect to happen and why. This forces you to have an actual reason beyond "it looked good."

The Psychology

This is where most journals fall short and where the real edge lives.

• Emotional state before the trade — Were you calm, anxious, bored, frustrated, overconfident? Were you revenge trading after a loss? Were you chasing because you missed an earlier move? Be honest. Nobody's reading this but you.
• Confidence level (1-10) — Rate how confident you were in the setup. Over time, you'll discover whether your high-confidence trades actually perform better than your low-confidence ones. Many traders are surprised to find their 6/10 confidence trades outperform their 10/10 trades because overconfidence leads to sloppy risk management.
• Did you follow your rules? — Yes or no. If no, what rule did you break and why? This single field, tracked over hundreds of trades, will reveal whether your losses come from bad strategy or bad discipline. They require very different fixes.

The Visual Record

Screenshots matter. Take a screenshot of the chart at the time of entry and another at exit. Mark your entry, stop, and target on the chart. Six months from now, you won't remember what the chart looked like. The screenshot preserves the full picture — the candle structure, volume profile, key levels, everything that influenced your decision.

You don't need anything fancy. A simple screen capture with annotations is enough. Store them in a folder organized by date. When you do your weekly review, these screenshots will be invaluable.

The Morning Routine

Journaling isn't just about recording trades after the fact. The most effective journaling practice starts before the market opens.

Spend 10-15 minutes each morning answering these questions:

1. What's the market context today? Is there economic data? What did overnight sessions do? Where are key levels from yesterday?
2. What setups am I looking for? Be specific. "I'm watching for a breakout above 5,250 on ES if it gets above the overnight high with volume." Writing this down prevents you from chasing random moves during the session.
3. What are my rules today? Max loss per day. Max number of trades. Which sessions you'll trade. Any setups you're avoiding.
4. How am I feeling? Tired? Stressed about something outside trading? Had a big win yesterday and feeling invincible? Self-awareness before you start trading is your first line of defense against emotional mistakes.

This takes 15 minutes and will save you thousands of dollars in impulsive trades you had no business taking.

The Post-Session Review

At the end of each trading day, spend 10-20 minutes reviewing your trades.

For each trade, ask:

• Did I follow my plan?
• Was my entry where I wanted it, or did I chase?
• Did I manage the trade according to my rules, or did I move my stop, exit early, or hold too long?
• What would I do differently if I saw this setup again tomorrow?

Then, zoom out:

• How many trades did I take today? Was that too many?
• What was my emotional trajectory through the day? Did I stay disciplined or did I deteriorate?
• Is there anything I need to adjust for tomorrow?

The Weekly Review (This Is Where the Real Learning Happens)

Dedicate 30-60 minutes each weekend to a deeper review. Look at the full week of trades and calculate:

• Win rate by setup type. Which setups made money this week? Which lost?
• Average winner vs. average loser. Is your reward-to-risk ratio holding up in practice, or are you cutting winners short and letting losers run?
• P&L by time of day. Are you making money in the morning and giving it back at lunch? That's a schedule problem, not a strategy problem.
• Rule violations. How many times did you break your rules? What triggered the violations?
• Emotional patterns. Any correlation between your emotional state and your results?

This weekly review is where breakthroughs happen. You'll see patterns in your own data that you never noticed in real time. Maybe your breakout trades are profitable but your mean reversion trades are bleeding money. Maybe you're great on Tuesdays and Wednesdays but terrible on Mondays. The data doesn't lie.

Common Journaling Mistakes

Only journaling winners. If you skip logging your losses, your journal is worthless. The losses contain the most valuable information.

Journaling but never reviewing. A journal you never look at is just a diary. The review process is where the journal becomes a tool for improvement. If you're not doing weekly reviews, you're wasting your time writing entries.

Too much detail. If your journal entry takes 20 minutes to write, you won't do it consistently. Keep it focused. The fields above take 2-3 minutes per trade. Consistency beats thoroughness.

Not enough detail. On the flip side, if all you're tracking is entry, exit, and P&L, you're missing the psychological and contextual data that actually drives improvement.

Quitting after two weeks. Journaling compounds. The first month of data is barely useful. The first three months start showing patterns. After six months of consistent journaling, you'll have a statistical picture of your trading that no amount of guessing can match.

Spreadsheet vs. Digital Journal

Many traders start with a spreadsheet. It works, but it has limitations. Manual data entry is tedious, formulas break, and adding screenshots is clunky. You'll eventually spend more time maintaining the spreadsheet than analyzing your trades.

A purpose-built trading journal solves these problems. It automates the calculations, makes visual reviews easy, and lets you filter and sort your data in ways that would take hours in a spreadsheet.

[Spoolado's built-in trading journal](https://www.spoolado.io/journal) is free on the basic plan and is designed specifically for futures traders. It tracks all the fields mentioned above, generates performance analytics automatically, and lets you tag trades by setup type for filtered analysis. You can start using it today without paying anything.

The tool you use matters less than the habit. If a spreadsheet is what gets you started, use a spreadsheet. If a digital journal makes you more consistent, use that. Just pick something and commit to it for at least 90 days before you decide whether it's working.

The One Thing That Changes Everything

Here's what most trading educators won't tell you: the journal itself doesn't make you better. The willingness to look at your own data honestly is what makes you better. The journal is just the mechanism.

When you sit down for your weekly review and see that you've broken your max-loss rule three times this week, or that your revenge trades have a 20% win rate, or that your lunch-hour trades are responsible for 80% of your weekly losses — that's uncomfortable. But that discomfort is exactly where growth happens.

The traders who improve are the ones who let the data change their behavior. The ones who stagnate are the ones who journal religiously but ignore what the journal is telling them.

Start today. Log your next trade. Do your first weekly review this weekend. Give it 90 days. The data will speak for itself.