Journal
A trading journal that records your reasoning, not just your P&L
Daily entries, per-trade reviews, playbooks, tags, screenshots and a full audit log.
Included in FreeMost trading journals stop at the trade log. TradeOnyx treats the journal as the central nervous system of your improvement: every entry links the plan you wrote pre-market to the trades you actually took, the mood you were in before and after, and the lessons you wrote at the end of the day. The audit log preserves every edit so a coach, a backtester, or your future self can reconstruct exactly how a decision was made.
01
Daily journal pages
Each trading day has its own page. Write the pre-market plan, note your reactions in real time, capture the post-market debrief and lessons learned. The page auto-links to the trades you took that day so review is one scroll, not a hunt across tabs.
- Pre-market plan: bias, key levels, no-trade conditions
- Live notes timestamped against your trades
- Post-market reflection with mood + rule-violation counter
- Lessons learned, tagged and searchable across days
- Calendar marker (📓) on every day you journalled
02
Per-trade reviews with execution grades
Each closed trade gets a structured review form: an A-to-F execution grade, mood before and after, a plan-adherence flag, and free-form notes. The grades feed the Discipline Scorecard so your judgement of your own trades becomes a measurable habit.
- Execution grade A-F — your own honest score
- Mood tracking before entry and after exit
- Plan-adherence flag: did you follow the briefing?
- Free-form notes for context the form fields miss
- Screenshot attachments per trade — chart, ladder, ticket
03
Playbooks and tags
Define a playbook once — entry trigger, exit rules, invalidation, R:R target — and assign it to every trade that took the setup. Tags add a free-form layer: setup tags, mistake tags, psychology tags. Filter the trades table by playbook or tag combination and the dashboard metrics recalculate on the subset.
- Strategy playbooks with entry / exit / invalidation criteria
- Tag groups: setup · mistake · psychology · custom
- Filter by playbook or tag to see how that subset performed
- Recurring tags surface in your weekly digest — pattern detection by default
04
Imports and audit log
Bring your history in from XTB, MetaTrader, Alpaca, the major German brokers (Scalable, Comdirect, Flatex, DEGIRO, ING-DiBa, Trade Republic) or a generic CSV. Every field mutation — yours or the importer's — lands in the append-only audit log, so the journal is coach-ready and DSGVO-export-ready from day one.
- 41 live import routes: broker presets, API sync, generic CSV
- Generic CSV fallback with column-mapping wizard
- Append-only audit log — no edits without history
- Export to PDF for print-binding or to CSV for tax filing
What a trading journal is, and what separates a useful one from an abandoned one
A trading journal is a record of your decisions, not a record of your results. Your broker already knows what you bought and what it returned. What no broker stores is why you took the trade, what you expected, how you felt while it ran, and what you would do differently. That gap is the entire point, and it is why a journal that only imports numbers stops being useful after a week.
The three moments worth capturing
Before the session: your bias, the levels you care about, and the conditions under which you will not trade. During: what actually happened versus what you expected, written while it is still true rather than reconstructed in the evening. After: whether you followed your own plan, which is a different question from whether you made money. A profitable trade that broke your rules is a worse outcome than a losing trade that followed them, and only the third moment tells you which one you had.
Why most journals are abandoned in three weeks
Not because traders lack discipline, but because manual entry costs more than it returns. Typing thirty fills into a spreadsheet after a session you already regret is a tax on the days you most need the record. The fix is that the numbers arrive on their own and your attention goes entirely to the part a machine cannot write. If a journal asks you to be the importer, it will lose to the market for your attention every time.
When a spreadsheet is genuinely enough
If you take a handful of trades a month, hold them for weeks, and mostly want a P&L history, a spreadsheet is fine and anything else is overhead. The case for a dedicated tool starts where the questions get harder: whether your results decay across the session, whether your position size drifts after a loss, whether one setup carries the account while three others quietly drain it. Those are questions about patterns across hundreds of trades, and a spreadsheet will not answer them without becoming a second job.
What to compare when you look at tools
Four things decide whether you will still be using it in six months. Does it import from your broker, specifically yours, without you rebuilding a CSV every time. Does free text sit next to the trade it belongs to, or in a separate notes field nobody opens. Does it evaluate rule adherence, not just profit. And can you get your data back out, in a format that outlives the vendor. Everything else is presentation.
Where TradeOnyx sits
The journal is the primary record here and the statistics are built on top of it, rather than the other way round. Entries and trades link both directions, execution grades score plan adherence separately from outcome, and the behavioural analyses run on your own history rather than a generic benchmark. Data export is CSV and PDF, including the German tax schedules. Honest limitation: there is no full-text search across entries yet, so retrieval today runs through tags, the calendar, and the AI connection rather than a keyword box.
Frequently asked questions
What should I write in a trading journal?
At minimum three things per session: the plan you made before it started, what actually happened while it ran, and whether you followed your own rules. Add the trades themselves, ideally imported rather than typed. Mood and rule violations are worth recording because they are the variables you can change, unlike the market.
How much time does journalling take per day?
Around five minutes when the trades import themselves: a short plan before the open and a short debrief after the close. It becomes a burden when you also have to be the data-entry clerk, which is why automatic import matters more than any other feature.
Is a spreadsheet good enough as a trading journal?
For a few trades a month with a simple P&L question, yes. It stops being enough when you want to know whether your behaviour changes after a loss, whether one setup carries your results, or whether your edge decays later in the session. Those need pattern analysis across hundreds of trades.
Can TradeOnyx import my trades automatically?
Yes, through 41 live import routes: broker presets for CSV, Excel and PDF statements, direct API sync for selected brokers, and a generic CSV import with a column-mapping wizard for anything without a preset. The broker support page lists which broker uses which route.
Does the trading journal cost anything?
No. The full journal is in the permanent free plan, together with one trading account, up to 500 trades, imports, charts, the daily briefing and the German tax export. Paid plans add more accounts, a higher trade ceiling and the AI analyses; they do not add journal features.
The journal is in the Free tier. Every account starts with the full feature set — paid tiers add headroom for more trades and more accounts, not better journalling.