Futures Trading Journal Template: Fields to Track and How to Review Them

Most traders who keep a journal can't answer simple questions from it. Which setup actually made money? Do the losses cluster in one hour? Do trades outside the pre-written plan do worse? A journal that records only dates and dollar results can't tell you, because the cause of each result was never written down. The fix is recording the same fields on every trade, then reviewing them in a fixed rhythm.

Download the journal template

Download the free trading journal CSV. Open it in Excel or import it into Google Sheets. No signup needed. It is a blank sheet with columns for the trade, planned risk and review notes. Add one row per trade. It has no automatic formulas.

Use actual fills for entry and exit prices. Record the gross dollar result before commissions and fees, then subtract those charges once for the net result. If your broker already reports a net result, do not subtract them again. The planned risk column is the amount you intended to lose if the stop was filled at your chosen price. It is not a guaranteed loss limit. Keep SIM and live records separate.

The minimum fields

Record these seven for every trade. They take a minute or two once the sheet exists.

1. Date and entry time, with the time zone stated (for example Eastern). Time-stamping makes clusters visible that a date alone hides.
2. Symbol and contract, such as ES or NQ.
3. Direction.
4. Entry price and stop price.
5. Entry reason in plain terms: a named setup, not 'looked good'. For example, 'reaction at a fixed KPL after the RTH open' or 'break of the opening range high'.
6. Exit price and whether the exit was planned (stop or target) or discretionary.
7. Net P&L after commissions and fees.

If you use the KPL levels, note which level and that it's fixed from the regular-session opening print. That makes it easy to check later whether you traded levels as written or improvised.

Optional fields that make patterns visible

Four extra columns are worth the effort. A quality rating from 1 to 5 for how closely the trade matched your written criteria. The market condition you judged at entry: trending, balanced or choppy. A yes or no for whether the trade was in your pre-session plan. And your state before entering: neutral, frustrated after a loss, overconfident after a win, or distracted. These are your own judgments, so they're only as honest as you are, but the same honesty requirement applies to every journal.

A daily review in four steps

1. Write the raw numbers first: net P&L, trade count, wins, losses, commissions. Do this before looking at any individual trade.
2. Mark each trade's entry, stop and exit on a chart screenshot. A rationalized entry looks different on a saved chart than it felt live.
3. Score each trade against your checklist: in the plan, all criteria met, exit as planned, quality rating.
4. Write one commitment for the next session, such as 'no entries after my cutoff time' or 'stops stay where I set them'. One item is easier to follow than five.

Keep it short enough that you'll do it on a bad day. A twenty minute review you skip beats nothing only if you actually do it, so shrink the process before you skip it.

Weekly analysis, with a worked example

Once a week, split trades by entry reason, time window and plan status, and compute win rate, average win, average loss and net for each. Here's a hypothetical week to show why win rate alone misleads:

Both groups win 50 percent of the time. Setup A earns $30 per trade on average and the off-plan group loses $20 per trade, because the average loss is larger than the average win. Without separate columns, a combined 50 percent win rate looks fine.

What the data can and can't tell you

Sixteen trades is a handful. Conclusions from a few trades per bucket are suggestions to keep watching, not proven edges or proven leaks. Wait for more trades per category before cutting a setup or a time window, and write down in advance what result would change your mind. Check results by day of week and time of day too, but a pattern across a few weeks can easily be chance. Treat a category as a real leak only when the pattern holds across a larger sample and you can explain a mechanism for it.

Spreadsheet or software

A spreadsheet is free, fully editable and easy to back up, and it works well at two to five trades a day. Dedicated journal software can import broker exports and compute analytics for you, which saves time at higher volume. Pricing and import support change, so check the vendor's current documentation. NinjaTrader's Trade Performance report gives you the quantitative side automatically, but it won't hold your entry reason, plan status or emotional state, so you'd add those yourself. Pick the tool you will keep using. Starting with a spreadsheet and switching later, if the volume justifies it, is a reasonable path.