Trading Journal Template: What to Log on Every Trade

1. Why a Template Matters

A trading journal template is just a fixed list of fields you fill in for every single trade. That sounds boring, and it is. The boring part is the point. When the layout never changes, you stop deciding what to write and start just writing. That is the difference between a journal that survives a rough week and one that quietly dies after trade number nine.

Without a template, journaling is a memory test. You log a big winner in loving detail, skip the two chops after it, and never write down the loss that actually stung. The record ends up flattering and useless. A template forces the same columns onto every trade - the good, the boring, and the embarrassing - so that when you sit down to review, you are looking at your real behavior instead of a highlight reel.

The one rule

Every trade gets the same fields, or the data lies. A partial journal is worse than none, because it feels like evidence while quietly hiding your worst habits.

This guide is the template itself: 14 things to log, grouped into what you fill in before the trade and what you fill in after. It pairs with the full Trading Journal Guide, which covers the review workflow in more depth.

2. The Two Halves of a Trade

A good trade record has two moments of writing, not one. Most people only do the second, and it is why their journals never make them better.

Pre-trade: the plan

Before you enter, you write down what you intend to do: the setup, the direction, where you get in, where you get out if you are wrong, where you take profit, and how big you are going. This half is a commitment device. Once it is written, you can measure whether you actually followed it.

Post-trade: the reality

After the trade closes, you fill in what really happened: the fills you actually got, the fees, the profit or loss, and the honest notes about what you did well or badly. The gap between the two halves - plan versus reality - is where nearly all your improvement lives.

If you only log after the fact

You lose the single most valuable comparison in the whole journal: what you planned versus what you did. “Moved my stop” only exists as a lesson if the original stop was written down first.

3. Pre-Trade: 10 Fields

Fill these in before or at the moment of entry. Yes, all ten. They take under a minute once the habit sets, and they are what turn a hunch into a testable decision.

1. Date & time: When you entered, to the minute. Powers session analysis, day-of-week patterns, and checking whether your best trades cluster at certain hours.
2. Symbol: The instrument. Tag the market type alongside it (stock / option / future / FX / crypto) so you can slice performance by asset class later.
3. Setup / strategy: The named pattern you are trading: bull-flag, vwap-reclaim, opening-drive, breakout-retest. If you cannot name it, that is data too - unnamed trades are usually impulse trades.
4. Direction: Long or short. Simple, but essential for spotting whether you have a directional bias that costs you money.
5. Planned entry: The price you intended to get in at. Recording the plan lets you measure entry slippage against reality.
6. Planned stop: Where you get out if you are wrong. This is the number, written before the trade, that you will later be tempted to move. Write it down so you can catch yourself.
7. Planned target: Where you intend to take profit. If you run multiple targets, note the first one at minimum.
8. Position size: Shares, contracts, or lots. Without size you cannot reconstruct your risk, and risk is the whole game.
9. Planned R: Your intended reward-to-risk: the distance from entry to target divided by the distance from entry to stop. A trade planned at less than 1R of reward should make you pause.
10. Thesis: One or two sentences on why you are taking this trade. The catalyst, the level, the reason. Keep it short - you are indexing your reasoning, not writing an essay.

4. Post-Trade: 9 Fields

Fill these in once the trade is closed, ideally the same day while the reasoning is still retrievable. Together with the pre-trade fields they complete the 14-field core, plus a few extras that make reviews far richer.

11. Actual entry & exit: The prices you really got filled at. Compared against your planned entry and stop, this reveals slippage and whether you exited on plan or on emotion.
12. Fees & commissions: The real cost of the trade. Small per trade, brutal over a year of overtrading. Net numbers are the only honest ones.
13. P&L (net): Profit or loss after fees and slippage. Gross P&L is vanity; net is what actually hit the account.
14. Realized R: Your actual result in R-multiples: net P&L divided by the dollar you initially risked. The single most useful trade-level number you own.
Screenshot: A marked-up chart of the trade. Costs ten seconds, and a folder of annotated charts is the best teaching material you will ever build.
Tags: Setup, context, and error tags (covered next). Tags are what let you query the journal instead of just scrolling it.
Mistakes: What went wrong, named honestly: moved-stop, sized-up, chased-entry, revenge-trade, early-exit. If nothing went wrong, leave it blank - do not invent guilt.
Emotion / rating: A one-to-five score on how well you executed, plus how you felt: calm, anxious, bored, tilted. Emotional patterns show up across trades, not within one.
Lesson: One sentence you would tell yourself before the next similar setup. If you can write it in ten words, you actually learned something.

Rate the decision, not the outcome

A losing trade you executed perfectly is a good trade. A winner where you moved your stop and got lucky is a bad one. Rate how you played it, or you will reward yourself for gambling.

5. How to Tag Trades

Tags are the query language of the template. Numbers tell you your R; tags tell you which kinds of trades are earning it and which are bleeding it. Keep three categories and resist the urge to invent fifty.

Setup tags: What the trade actually was: bull-flag, vwap-reclaim, level-reject, opening-drive. Aim for three to seven named setups total. More than that and you lose the ability to compare.
Context tags: The market backdrop: trend-day, chop, pre-earnings, post-FOMC, overnight-gap, thin-volume. The same setup behaves very differently depending on context.
Error tags: What went wrong when it did: moved-stop, sized-up, revenge-trade, early-exit, missed-target, chased-entry. Counting these over a month is the most honest discipline metric you have.

The habit that makes tags pay off: use the exact same spelling every time. bull-flag and Bull Flag are two different tags to a spreadsheet, and split tags hide patterns. Keep a small legend of approved tags somewhere visible.

6. The Review Cadence

A template you fill in but never read is just bookkeeping. The value comes from reading it back on a schedule. Three loops, each zoomed out further than the last.

1
Daily - 10 minutes
At the end of each session, close out every trade: fill the post-trade fields, tag honestly, and write one lesson. The trades are fresh now; tomorrow the reasoning is gone.
2
Weekly - 30 minutes
Aggregate the week. Total R, win rate, which setups made money, which lost, and how many trades carried an error tag. Pick one thing to work on next week. Exactly one.
3
Monthly - 60 minutes
Zoom out to the equity curve and expectancy trend. Is any setup losing for the third month running? Is your discipline score rising or falling? This is where you audit your direction, not just your week.

7. Where a Static Template Breaks

A spreadsheet template is a genuinely good place to start. It is free, it is yours, and building it by hand teaches you what each field is for. Being honest about where it stops working is part of using it well.

Everything is manual. Every price, fee, and P&L is typed by hand. Manual entry is slow and error-prone, and the friction is exactly what kills the habit after a few weeks.
No live metrics. Want win rate by setup, or expectancy over the last 20 trades? You are building pivot tables and fixing formulas instead of learning from the data.
R has to be computed by hand. Every realized-R cell is a formula you can typo. One wrong reference and a month of numbers is quietly wrong.
Tags drift. Free-text tags splinter into near-duplicates, and nothing warns you. Your patterns hide behind spelling.
Screenshots live somewhere else. The chart is in a folder, the row is in the sheet, and linking them by hand rarely lasts.

None of this means the template is wrong. It means a static template is the training wheels. If you want to go deeper on the spreadsheet route, the Trading Journal in Excel guide covers formulas and layout in detail.

The usual failure mode

Manual spreadsheet journaling works for about six weeks. Then a busy week hits, you skip two days, the backfill feels like a chore, and the sheet dies. A dedicated app removes the friction that causes that - auto-import from your broker, auto-computed R, consistent tags, and live metrics - so the habit outlasts your motivation.

8. Copy-Paste Column List

Here is the whole template as a flat list of columns. Paste it across the first row of a new spreadsheet, one field per cell, and you have the layout ready to fill.

How to use it

1
Split into two blocks
Everything up to Thesis is filled in before you enter. Everything from Actual Entry onward is filled in after the close. A subtle shade change between the two blocks helps the eye.
2
Add a formula for Realized R
Net P&L divided by (Position Size × distance from planned entry to planned stop). Compute it once and copy down so you never do it by hand per trade.
3
Freeze the header row
So the field names stay visible as the log grows. Sounds trivial; saves real friction at trade 200.
4
Keep a tag legend
A small second tab listing your approved setup, context, and error tags. Consistency here is what makes the Tags column queryable later.

9. Field Glossary

The handful of terms in the template that trip people up, in plain language.

R-multiple

Your result measured in units of initial risk. Risk $100, make $250, that is +2.5R. It lets you compare trades of wildly different sizes on one scale.

Planned R

The reward-to-risk you set up before entry: distance to target divided by distance to stop. A plan of less than 1R means you are risking more than you stand to make.

Realized R

What you actually got: net P&L divided by the dollar you initially risked. The gap between planned and realized R is a story worth reading.

Net P&L

Profit or loss after fees, commissions, and slippage. The only P&L number that matches your account balance.

Setup

The named, repeatable pattern behind the trade. Naming it is what lets you measure whether that pattern actually has an edge for you.

Error tag

A label for a rule you broke on a trade. Counting them over time is the clearest read on your discipline you can get.

10. Put the Template to Work

Start with the spreadsheet today - the columns above are all you need. When the manual entry starts costing you the habit, that is your signal the training wheels have done their job.

Trading Journal Guide - the full workflow behind this template: what to review, and the metrics that make you better.
Trading Journal in Excel - build the template properly in a spreadsheet, formulas and all.
How to Analyze Trades - what to actually look for once the log has some rows in it.
Start a free trial - skip the manual entry: auto-computed R, consistent tags, and live metrics that a static sheet cannot give you.