Types of Trading Journal: Spreadsheet, App, Notebook and More
Notebook, spreadsheet, notes app, journal tool or platform history, side by side, plus the one test that matters: can it hold your own fields?
3 Nov 2026 · 5 min read
There are five common ways to keep a trading journal: a paper notebook, a spreadsheet, a notes app, a dedicated journal tool, or the platform's own history. They differ less in what they can hold than in what they can calculate, how they cope with screenshots and several accounts, and where they quietly fail. The table lays those out. The ratings are our judgement, and no product is named because the categories matter more than the brands.
The five types side by side
| Type | Setting up | Effort per trade | What it can calculate | Screenshots | Several accounts | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paper notebook | Minutes | High: every trade by hand | Nothing, unless you add up by hand | Printed or sketched | Breaks quickly | Searching. Finding every trade of one setup means reading every page. |
| Spreadsheet | An evening for the layout | Medium: rows by hand, or pasted from an export | Anything you can write a formula for | Links to files you keep elsewhere | Works if you add an account column, and you stay consistent | A formula range that stops one row short, and the habit of fixing the sheet instead of reviewing. |
| Notes app or document | Minutes | Medium: free text per trade | Nothing | Pasted in, easily | Breaks quickly | Structure. Fields drift, so two entries cannot be compared. |
| Journal app or service | An account, then an import or a connection | Low to medium: many import trades, you add the judgement | A fixed set of statistics the product chose | Usually built in | Varies. Check how it treats one decision on several accounts. | Fields. Your model, grading or checklist may not fit the product's boxes, and you cannot change them. |
| Platform history alone | None | None | Profit and loss, win rate if the platform shows it | None | One account at a time | It records what happened, never why. It cannot answer a question about your decisions. |
The test that decides it: can it hold your fields?
Every trader's model, timeframe, grading and list of confluences is different. A discretionary trader may want a field for the state they were in; a rules-based one wants to know whether the rules were followed; someone with a checklist wants each item recorded. The honest question about any journal is not how many charts it draws but whether you can record the thing you actually decide on.
A spreadsheet and a notebook hold anything and calculate little. A fixed-field tool calculates a lot and holds only what its authors anticipated. Neither is wrong. What goes wrong is choosing a tool for its statistics and then dropping the field you care about, so the dashboard fills with numbers about a method you do not use.
Choosing, in three questions
- Will you enter it? The best journal is the one you still use in month four. If a spreadsheet feels like homework, it will lose to a form with five fields.
- Can it hold what you decide on? List your model, your grade and your checklist, then check each has a place.
- Can you get your data out? A journal you cannot export is a journal you cannot leave. A file you can open in a spreadsheet is the minimum.
Starting in a spreadsheet and moving later is a perfectly good plan: the effort goes into deciding the fields, and the fields move with you. For which fields to start with, see what to write in a trading journal, and for the habit itself, how to keep one. If you trade several accounts, read journalling across accounts before you pick.
Where Trepeat stands
We're working on a free journal and a backtester, with no date yet. Today Trepeat is a trade copier for MT4, MT5 and cTrader, currently on demo accounts, and you can add notes, a grade and screenshots to any copied trade once it closes, with a calendar of your results.
It has six fixed fields, so by the test above it is a fixed-field tool. The journal documentation lists them, and the entries export to Excel (.xlsx).
Written by the Trepeat team.