Free trading journal template for Excel and Google Sheets
Free trading journal template for Excel and Google Sheets. Enter prices, stop and fees — risk, R, expectancy and the cost of mistakes are calculated.
A trading journal is a spreadsheet where every trade has its prices, its risk and the reason you took it. After a month it shows what makes you money and what costs you. This template is a ready-made journal: one row per trade, and the formulas do the rest.
What's in the trading journal template
The file has four sheets.
| Sheet | What's on it |
|---|---|
| Trades | 29 columns and 1,000 rows with the formulas in place. The first three rows are examples. |
| Statistics | Your totals, plus tables by mistake, setup, emotion and week. |
| How to use | What to enter in each column and how it is calculated. |
| Lists | Your exchanges, setups, mistakes and emotions for the drop-down lists. |
The columns of the Trades sheet come in groups:
- At entry: date and time in UTC, symbol, side (LONG or SHORT), exchange, entry price, quantity, contract size, stop, take profit and the account balance at entry.
- At exit: date and time, exit price, fees, and funding or swap — what you paid or received for holding the position.
- Calculated: risk in $ and in % of balance, gross PnL, net PnL after fees and funding, R and PnL in % of balance. R is the trade's result divided by its risk: how many stops' worth you made or lost.
- Review: setup, mistake, emotion, confidence from 1 to 5, a comment and a link to a screenshot.
You fill in the white columns; the grey ones are formulas. If a number isn't written the way your spreadsheet expects — a comma as the decimal mark where it wants a point, say, or the other way round — it warns you.
How to keep a trading journal in Excel
- Download and open the file. In Excel, LibreOffice or Numbers, double-click it. In Google Sheets, use File → Import.
- Fill in the Lists sheet. Add your setups and your usual mistakes: they appear in the drop-down lists and in the statistics.
- Delete the examples. The three yellow rows are samples. Delete whole rows: if you clear only their contents, you erase those rows' formulas too.
- Log the entry right away. Time in UTC, price, quantity, stop and take profit. The stop is the one you had at entry: risk and R are counted from it.
- After the exit, add the numbers from your history. Take the exit price, fees and funding from the exchange's or terminal's trade history.
- Review the trade on the spot. Setup, mistake, emotion and one sentence: why you entered and what you would do differently.
Which numbers to check every week
Once a week, open the Statistics sheet. On the template's three examples it shows:
Profit factor is all your profit divided by all your loss: above 1, you're net positive. But week to week, four things matter more:
- Expectancy in R. The average trade's result, measured in risks. +0.3 R means an average trade earns a third of what you risk. Below zero, the system is losing money.
- Win rate, read with “Avg win ÷ avg loss”. Neither says much on its own. A 40% win rate is profitable if the average win is twice the average loss.
- The cost of mistakes. The “By mistake” table shows how many trades had each mistake and what they cost. The week's most expensive mistake is the one to work on next.
- Risk and drawdown. Did your risk in % of balance creep up after a losing streak, and how far did the account fall from its peak?
Where an Excel trading journal falls short
The spreadsheet honestly counts whatever you put in it. The weak spot is the typing.
- Time. Each trade is up to 20 fields filled in by hand. At ten trades a day, people give up on the journal fast.
- Forgotten trades. Skip a couple of small losses, and the statistics look better than the trading.
- No exact fills. Scaling in and partial exits collapse into one average price, and fees and funding have to be dug out of the history.
- No stop history. If you moved the stop, the sheet holds whatever you remember. Get the first stop wrong, and R is wrong too.
- No picture of the market. What the chart and the order book looked like at entry survives only if you took a screenshot.
Frequently asked questions
Can I open the template in Google Sheets?
Yes. In Google Sheets, choose File → Import and upload the file. The template has no macros — only ordinary formulas and drop-down lists.
Does it work with Notion?
Notion doesn't run Excel formulas. Download the CSV instead — it holds just the column names. In Notion, choose Settings → Import → CSV to get a database with the same columns. Risk, PnL and R then have to be rebuilt with Notion formulas.
Does the template work for MetaTrader 5 and forex?
Yes. Enter the quantity in lots and, under “Contract size”, the number from the symbol's specification: in MetaTrader 5, right-click in Market Watch → Specification. Put the swap in the funding column. If the pair's second currency isn't the dollar, as in USDJPY, type the profit from the terminal into “Gross PnL” over the formula.
And for crypto futures?
Yes — that's what it was built for. For USDT and USDC futures, enter the quantity in coins and leave “Contract size” empty. If the exchange shows the size in contracts, enter how many coins one contract holds. Coin-margined (COIN-M) futures use a different formula, so enter the result from the exchange's history.
Is the template really free?
Yes: no sign-up and no e-mail. The file is yours — change the columns and the lists to suit you.