Download: trading-journal-template.csv
The file opens in any spreadsheet program. It ships with three example rows — delete them once you understand the format.
The columns you type
Setup — a short name from your own list, the same word every time. london-open-pullback, not "the usual morning one". A fixed vocabulary is what makes "which setup makes money" answerable; free text produces forty spellings of one idea.
Planned Stop and Planned Target — the levels you intended, written before the trade closes. These are the only fields that let anything compare intention against outcome, and they stop being evidence the moment they are filled in afterwards.
Reason — one line, also before the outcome. Not an essay. A reason that cannot be written in one line before entry is usually not a reason.
In Control — yes or no. A binary is more honest than a five-point mood scale and takes a second. After two hundred trades it splits your history into two comparable groups.
The columns your broker already knows
Symbol · Side · Volume · Open Time · Open Price · Close Time · Close Price · Commission · Swap · Gross P/L
Type these only if you have no export. If you do have one, import it instead — it is faster and more accurate than your memory of a price to five decimals.
Formats that matter:
- Times —
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. Consistency matters more than the exact shape. - Side —
buyorsell. - Commission and Swap — as positive costs. The tools subtract them.
- Gross P/L — the result before those costs.
Why gross and not net
This is the one design decision worth explaining, because it looks like extra work.
If the file carried a single Net P/L column, the importer would correctly conclude that costs are already inside it and report your commission total as zero — you would lose the ability to see what you pay. Splitting them means the tools show both, and net is computed from the two.
The reason this matters more than it sounds is on net P&L: costs are the most reliable number in trading and the one most often dropped from analysis.
Reading it back
Save as CSV and drop it into any of these — no upload, no account, everything happens in your browser:
- What overtrading costs you — needs the times and results.
- Intent vs execution — uses
Planned StopandPlanned Target. This is the payoff for filling those two columns honestly. - Discipline check — six checks at once.
- Luck or skill — how many trades you need before your results mean anything.
If the tools say the file was not recognised, the usual cause is a renamed or deleted column among Symbol, Side, Open Price and Gross P/L — those four are what the parser identifies the format by.
Adding your own columns
Safe. Extra columns are ignored by the parser rather than breaking it, so add whatever helps you — screenshots links, tags, a longer note.
Just do not rename the four above, and do not replace Gross P/L with a net figure unless you also delete the cost columns.