Free Trading Journal Excel Template (Download, No Sign-Up)

You finish the session, open a blank spreadsheet to log your trades, and spend the next twenty minutes deciding what the columns should be. By the time the sheet looks right you have lost the will to fill it in, and a week later it is abandoned.

So we built the spreadsheet for you. It is free, it works in Excel, and you do not need to give us an email address to get it.

Download the free trading journal (.xlsx) →

Below is what is inside, how to set it up in ten minutes, and how to get real answers out of it once you have a few weeks of trades in it.

What is in the template

The workbook has five tabs. You only ever type into the cream-coloured cells; the grey ones calculate themselves.

Start Here

A one-page guide to the file: what each tab is for, the colour key, and the handful of columns that matter most. Read it once and you will not need it again.

Trade Log

One row per trade, with room for 1,000 trades. You fill in:

Date and time, instrument and direction (pick Long or Short from a list).
Setup, picked from your own playbook (more on that below).
Entry, stop and exit prices and position size. These are optional but useful when you review a trade later.
Risk ($): what you would have lost if your stop was hit.
P&L ($): the final result, after fees. Leave it blank while the trade is open.
Executed?: Yes for trades you took, No for setups you saw but chose to skip, with a reason.
Followed Plan?, Confidence (1-10) and Emotion at entry.
Tags, pre-trade notes, a post-trade reflection and a screenshot link.

The sheet then works out the R-multiple, the result (Win, Loss, Breakeven, Active or Skipped), your running P&L and your drawdown from the peak.

Dashboard

Everything on this tab updates from the Trade Log. At the top: closed trades, win rate, total P&L, average win and loss, profit factor, expectancy in R, largest win and loss, maximum drawdown, average confidence, and the percentage of trades where you followed your plan.

Below that, the same numbers broken down by setup, by emotion at entry, by whether you followed your plan, by confidence level, by day of the week and by month, with charts for P&L by month and by setup.

Setups

Your playbook. Write each setup down once: its name, market and timeframe, entry rules, what invalidates it, exit rules, maximum risk and minimum reward-to-risk. The Setup column on the Trade Log picks from this list, which keeps names consistent so the dashboard can group them. If you have never written your rules down, our pre-trade checklist template is a good place to start.

Weekly Review

Each week fills in automatically with its trade count, win rate, P&L and number of rule breaks. You answer three questions: what went well, what the biggest mistake or lesson was, and the one thing you will focus on next week. For a fuller routine, see the weekly trading review template.

Setting it up in ten minutes

Download the file and save a copy somewhere you will find it again. You can also open it in Google Sheets by uploading it to Google Drive.
Fill in the Setups tab. Even two or three setups is enough to start. If a trade does not fit any of them, that is worth knowing too.
Overwrite the example trade. The first row of the Trade Log, in blue text, shows the format. Replace it with your most recent real trade.
Log every trade the same day. Your memory of why you took a trade, and how you felt, fades within hours.

The three columns that matter most

You can skip most of the optional columns and still get value from the journal. Do not skip these three.

Risk ($)

Without it there is no R-multiple, and without R-multiples you cannot compare a trade on a small account with one on a larger one, or a futures trade with a stock trade.

Take the example trade in the template: a long on NQ with a $40 risk that closed for a $76.50 profit. That is 76.50 ÷ 40 = 1.91R. If your next three trades are a full loss (-1R), a breakeven (0R) and a 3R winner, your expectancy over the four trades is (1.91 − 1 + 0 + 3) ÷ 4 = 0.98R per trade. Your win rate is two wins out of three decided trades, or 67%, because breakevens are left out of the win rate. If R-multiples are new to you, R-multiple and expectancy explained walks through the idea step by step.

Followed Plan?

This is the most honest column in the sheet, and the most useful. After a month, compare the "Yes" and "No" rows in the Dashboard's plan section. If most of your losses sit in the "No" row, your strategy may be fine and your discipline is the problem. Once you can see that in your own numbers, it becomes much harder to argue with.

Emotion and Confidence

These feel soft compared with P&L, but after thirty or so trades the Dashboard shows whether your feelings predict your results. Maybe "Bored" trades are almost all losers. Maybe your highest-confidence trades are no better than your medium ones. You cannot fix a pattern you have never measured.

Tips for keeping it going

Log skipped setups. Set Executed? to No and note why. Over time you will see whether your skips were good judgement or fear.
Keep the headers as they are. The Dashboard relies on them. If you want extra columns, add them to the right of the last column.
Enter P&L after fees. Otherwise your expectancy will look better than it really is.
Review weekly, not daily. Daily reviews tend to turn into reactions to one trade. A week gives you enough trades to see a pattern.

Where a spreadsheet stops being enough

A spreadsheet journal is a perfectly good way to start, and many traders never need more. The limits show up as you trade more: every row is typed by hand, the review is up to you, and nothing warns you in the moment when you are about to break a rule. We cover the trade-offs in more detail in free trading journal options and Kaizen vs an Excel spreadsheet journal.

Kaizen records the same things as this template, including setups, R-multiples, confidence, emotion, notes and tags. It adds broker imports, analytics such as results by emotion and confidence, nudges when it spots revenge trading or overtrading, weekly self-reviews written for you, and Melfi, a voice trading psychologist you can talk to during the session.

Start with the spreadsheet and keep it for a month. If the habit sticks and you want the logging and review done for you, Kaizen is the next step.

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