the week my spreadsheet started telling the truth
Last Tuesday at 9:14 a.m., I watched a $1,283 NQ long bleed to $317 in nine seconds on TradingView.
I had the chart, the fills, and the little voice in my head telling me I was “still in the trade.” That was the problem. I keep a trading audit framework open whenever I review a session because memory lies faster than a bad market open.
The first useful thing I ever built was not a fancy app. It was a dead plain Excel file with ugly cells and no mercy. I named the tabs by what they did, not by what sounded smart. Raw fills. Screens. Review. That was enough to show me the shape of my own bad habits.
On April 18, 2025, I took a $640 loss on MES after I moved my stop twice and then stared at the chart like it owed me a refund. I felt stupid, then angry, then quiet.
The log that stings is the one that saves you money.
Most traders think they need better discipline before they need a better journal. I think that is backward. The journal is the discipline. When I used FTMO rules in the past, I could pass a clean week and still have no idea why one day felt easy and the next day felt like I was wrestling a wet bag. Excel made that visible. It did not flatter me. That was the point.
how to make a trading journal in excel without turning it into homework
When people ask me how to make a trading journal in excel, I tell them to start with the trade, not the template.
I build one row per trade. That row gets the date, the instrument, the session, the setup name, the direction, the entry, the stop, the exit, and the R result. If the trade came from NinjaTrader, I paste the fill data in the same row. If I took it on Rithmic through Tradovate, I still force it into the same shape. Same structure every time. That is what makes the file useful after the third messy week.
The real trick is not the formulas. It is the shame filter. I add a note column for the exact reason I clicked. Not “felt good.” Not “looked strong.” I write the thing I would not want another trader to read out loud. That is usually where the truth sits.
For screenshots, I use one cell link and one image paste. I do not try to make the file pretty. Pretty is what people build when they want to feel organized. Useful is what people build when they want to stop leaking money.
If you are learning how to make a trading journal in excel, keep the first version small enough that you can finish it on a bad day. I learned that after I made my first workbook too clever. It had dropdowns, color codes, and a dashboard that looked like a small hedge fund. I stopped filling it out in six days.
The ugly version lasted.
I also keep one tab for weekly review. Not because I love admin work. Because Friday night is when the market tells you what kind of person you were that week. On a good week, I trade less than I want to. On a bad week, I see the exact time I started forcing trades in NQ after lunch.
what to include in a trading journal
What to include in a trading journal is a simpler question than traders make it sound.
I need enough fields to answer one thing clearly. Was this a good decision or a lucky one?
That means I always keep the market context, the setup, the size, the reason for entry, and the emotional state before I clicked. I also keep the session type. London, New York open, lunchtime chop, post-news fade. The same setup can behave like a saint at 9:35 a.m. and like a drunk at 1:20 p.m.
The first time I watched CL in the journal instead of on the chart, I noticed my worst losses came when I treated oil like it was ES. That sounds obvious now. It did not feel obvious when I was taking the trades. My journal did not care about my ego. It only cared that I kept making the same mistake in a different costume.
I also track whether I was trading my plan or trading boredom. That field alone saved me more than any “best setup” note ever did. If I was flat for forty minutes and then jumped into a weak MES breakout, the journal caught it. If I had three clean trades in a row and then reached for a fourth, the journal caught that too.
The important part is not collecting more data than you can read. It is collecting the few things that actually explain your P&L.
how to analyze trading performance with a journal
How to analyze trading performance with a journal is where Excel starts to earn its keep.
I sort by instrument first. NQ and MES do not punish me in the same way, so I do not let them hide inside one blended number. Then I sort by time of day, because my morning brain and my afternoon brain are not the same trader. Then I sort by setup. Breakout, pullback, fade, hold, whatever I was pretending had an edge that month.
Once I did that, the pattern got ugly fast. My best trades were not the ones that looked cleanest on the chart. They were the ones where I had already decided the invalidation point before the candle touched my entry. My worst trades came when I let hope stretch the stop. That is the part people skip when they ask how to analyze trading performance with a journal. They want a clever metric. The real edge is usually a boring one. It is the trade you did not take.
I know traders who use Sierra Chart with perfect execution and still do not know their own weak spot because they never group the results by behavior. They only stare at total P&L. Total P&L is a liar if your sample is messy. One good day can hide six sloppy ones. One lucky trend can cover a month of bad entries.
My P&L did not improve when I added more trades. It improved when I started killing bad ones faster.
That sentence came out of a month where I stopped pretending every setup deserved a chance. It showed me that my win rate was not the first problem. My selection was. A journal that shows selection quality will save you from the fantasy that size or frequency will fix bad reading.
If you want a blunt test, compare your first trade of the day to your fourth. Mine were not even close. The first one was usually clear. The fourth one was often revenge wearing a cleaner shirt. Once I saw that, I stopped asking whether the market was “fair” and started asking whether I was still trading with a fresh head.
Most trading journals fail because traders obsess over note-taking, not decision quality.
That is my contrarian take, and I mean it. The niche says to journal more, track more, tag more, review more. I think the opposite problem is more common. Traders build beautiful journals they hate using. Then they skip the hard part, which is confronting the same bad decision in plain language. Excel works because it is ugly enough to keep the focus on the trade. It does not reward you for pretending.
how to create a trading journal in notion
How to create a trading journal in notion is a fair question, and I still use Notion for the parts Excel is bad at.
Notion is good for text, screenshots, tags, and post-trade notes. It is good when I want to dump a messy thought after a red day and come back later with a cooler head. It is also good if I want to keep a setup library with examples from Topstep eval days or old Apex runs.
But if I want to calculate anything, Excel wins.
That is the clean split I wish someone had handed me earlier. Notion is the notebook. Excel is the accountant. Notion helps me remember what I thought. Excel helps me see what happened. When I used only Notion, I got more reflective and less accurate. When I used only Excel, I got accurate and a little blind to context. The two together work better than either one alone.
I usually store the emotional notes in Notion and the fills in Excel. Then I bring the useful stuff back into the workbook once a week. If I had a weird day after a CPI print, I want that note preserved. If I had three bad shorts in EUR/USD after a breakout failure, I want the numbers lined up where I can see them in one glance.
That setup also makes review faster. I do not need to rebuild the whole story every Sunday. I just open the workbook, scan the ugly rows, and ask one question in my head. Did I trade the plan or did I trade my mood?
The market answers that question more honestly than I do.
the part I stopped trying to automate
I used to think the goal was to automate review as much as possible. That was a mistake.
Automation is good for collection. It is bad for conscience. I can pull fills from TradingView or copy them from a broker statement, but I still need my own eyes on the reason behind the trade. No script can tell me that I got itchy after twenty minutes and entered early because I wanted action.
That is why my workbook has a review block I cannot shortcut. I read the trade, I read the note, and I decide whether the entry deserves a pass or a cut. The answer is usually clear by the third sentence.
On one good week in March 2025, I had fewer trades than the week before and made more. That was the first time the journal made me uncomfortable in a useful way. It showed me that my cleanest week was also my smallest one. I had been treating activity like proof of effort. The spreadsheet showed me it was often just noise.
The same thing happened with NQ around the open. My worst trades clustered when I forced speed before I had a read. Once I saw the pattern, I stopped pretending the open was a place to prove anything.
If you are still figuring out how to make a trading journal in excel, build it so the bad trades cannot hide. That is the whole job. Give each trade one row. Give each row a reason. Review the rows when you are calm.
A journal that only makes you feel organized is a toy.
A journal that makes you cut one bad habit is a tool.
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