Trading Journal Entry Template: A Format You Can Copy

Here is the full template. For every trade, capture: Instrument (what you traded), Direction (long or short), Size (number of contracts or shares), Entry price, Exit price, Entry and exit timestamps, Setup tag (which of your named setups this was), R or result (the outcome in R-multiples or currency), Emotion at entry (a single honest word — calm, anxious, greedy, bored), Mistake flag (did this trade break a rule, and which), a Screenshot of the chart at entry or exit, and a one-line Note about what you'd do differently.

That's twelve fields, but they split cleanly into two groups by who fills them. The first seven — instrument, direction, size, entry, exit, timestamps, and the raw result — are objective facts about the trade. The last five — setup, emotion, mistake flag, screenshot, and note — are your judgement and context. Keeping every entry to exactly these fields is what makes the journal consistent, because consistency across trades is what lets you filter and compare them later. A guide on [what to track in a trading journal](/learn/what-to-track-in-a-trading-journal) explains why each field earns its place.

The first seven fields — the objective ones — should never be typed by hand. Instrument, direction, size, entry, exit, timestamps, and the raw result are all facts your broker already recorded, so re-entering them manually is slow, error-prone, and exactly the friction that kills journals on busy days. When these import automatically from a CSV or a live, read-only broker sync, they land complete and correct on every single trade, including the ones you'd be tempted to skip logging.

This division of labour is what makes the template sustainable. With the mechanical seven filling themselves, the only work left for you is the five judgement fields, which take seconds. FundedNotes imports the objective data on demand from Rithmic, Tradovate, NinjaTrader, DXtrade, and Match-Trader — or from a CSV — reading your fills without ever placing an order, so the base of every entry is automatic. You add the tag, the emotion, the flag, the screenshot, and the note; the software handles the rest.

The five fields you fill in yourself are where the journal's value actually lives, because they're the context that raw fills can't capture. The setup tag lets you group trades and discover which setups make money; keep it to your fixed vocabulary so the data doesn't fragment. The emotion field — one honest word at entry — is what later reveals whether your worst trades cluster around a particular state of mind. The mistake flag turns vague discipline into a number you can track over time.

The screenshot and the note round out the context. A chart image at entry or exit lets future-you reconstruct what you actually saw, which memory will not reliably do months later. The one-line note — specifically what you'd do differently — is the seed of every lesson the journal will eventually teach you. Keep all five short and honest. The point isn't to write an essay per trade; it's to capture just enough judgement that the entry becomes analysable, and to do it consistently enough that the patterns show up.

A well-structured entry isn't just a record — it's the raw material for the metrics that actually guide your trading. The objective fields feed win rate, profit factor, average win versus average loss, and expectancy, both overall and broken down by any tag. The setup tag lets you compute those same metrics per setup, so you can see which of your plays carries your edge. The session and emotion fields let you slice performance by time of day or state of mind, surfacing patterns no single trade reveals.

The mistake flag feeds your rule-adherence rate over time, and for prop traders the size and result fields feed the firm-specific metrics — distance to drawdown and consistency limits — that decide whether an evaluation survives. The whole point of a disciplined entry template is that it makes all of this automatic: log every trade the same way and the analysis falls out for free. A [trading journal](/trading-journal) built on this template computes those metrics for you, and you can start with the exact format above on the [free trial](/pricing).