Trading journal template in Excel
One sheet to log your trades and a dashboard that computes itself. What most templates leave out, and the only part that actually changes anything: the behaviour columns — which setup, what you felt going in, and whether you followed your plan — plus the comparison between what happens when you follow it and when you do not.
No sign-up and no email. Opens in Excel, LibreOffice and Google Sheets.
Why the «did I follow my plan?» column changes everything
Your broker statement already tells you what you won and lost. What it cannot tell you is WHY, because it does not know what you intended to do. That column turns the journal into something that answers the one actionable question: if your win rate is worse when you follow the plan than when you break it, the plan is the problem; if it is the other way round, discipline is — and those are two completely different fixes.
What is inside
Trades
One row per closed trade, with 500 ready. Direction, emotion and adherence use drop-downs rather than free text: if what you type does not match exactly, the dashboard stops counting it and says nothing — the most treacherous failure a spreadsheet has.
Dashboard
Win rate, total result, average winner and loser, profit factor, average result per trade and average R. Below that, the plan-adherence block, and breakdowns by setup, by emotion and by day of the week.
How to use it
Six steps, what the template does not do, and the disclaimer. A two-minute read.
R, and why it does not ask for your account balance
Every row has a risk column: what you were willing to lose on that trade. R is the result divided by that risk, and it is what makes a 20 € trade comparable to a 200 € one. It deliberately does not ask for your account balance: you would have to keep it updated row by row for the figure to mean anything, and you already know the risk of each trade when you open it.
What it does not do, said before you find out
- It projects nothing. No compounding, no «if you keep this up», no profit target. Every figure describes what already happened.
- It does not compute your result. That number comes from your broker; typing it in is part of the review, not an oversight.
- It has no macros. It is a plain .xlsx, so Excel will not block it and your antivirus will not flag it.
- It holds 500 trades. For more, copy the formulas down and widen the ranges.
- It groups and adds up, it does not analyse. Crossing your behaviour with results over time is another job.
When it gets tight
This template and SuaVar's journal do the same thing, except the journal imports your platform's history, computes on its own and keeps the context of each trade. And you do not start from scratch: save the sheet as CSV and the app reads all of it — symbol, direction, dates with their time, prices, volume, result, and also the setup, the emotion, the R and whether you followed your plan — so what you logged here keeps counting there.