Trading journal
A trading journal is a record of the trades you took and why. It turns a vague memory of the month into numbers you can check.
In depth
It has two halves. The numbers half is every fill: symbol, direction, size, entry, exit, time and cost. That part answers what happened and can be imported from your broker. The words half is why you took the trade and how you felt, and nothing can import that for you.
The numbers alone already say plenty. Twelve trades, seven winners at 80 dollars and five losers at 190 dollars, and you have found the leak without writing a sentence. You are right often and you hold the wrong ones far too long.
Why it matters
Memory keeps the good trades and trims the rest. Ask a trader for their win rate and you get a guess, usually a generous one. A journal replaces the guess with a count. It also shows patterns you would never catch trade by trade, like results falling away after 2 pm.
TraderLog imports your trades from Schwab, IBKR or a CSV, drops each day's profit and loss on a calendar, and gives you one free-text entry per day. The stats page and the habit findings do the pattern spotting from those same trades.
Frequently asked questions
Why you took the trade, where the stop was, and what you would do differently. One honest line beats a page.
Yes to start with. It gets tedious once you want stats per symbol, per tag or by how long you held.
Keep your Trading journal trades on the record in TraderLog
Trades import from Schwab and IBKR on their own, every day lands on a calendar with its P&L, and the day's entry sits beside it. Replay any trade on a TradingView chart. Free for 14 days, no card.
Every trading morning at 8:40 ET our model draws the SPY, QQQ and IWM zones it expects to matter, on a TradingView chart, before the open. Where price reaches one, it has turned 74 percent of the time. Free, no account. See today's map