If you want to be a consistently successful trader over the long term, you’ll soon figure out the key is to set clear trading goals before you start. That’s because it’s easy to occasionally have a very successful day of trading, but consistent returns day over day, month over month, require work.
Luckily, today, there are numerous online trading journal software options that can assist you in analyzing and improving your performance through automated tracking. You can use these trading tools to keep track of movements across a variety of asset classes, track your profits and losses, and confidently complete every trade.
In that way, you can make the most of each and every trade regardless of whether an asset is bullish or bearish.
Then only downside is that some of these journals are expensive, and you might not have the budget to pay for a solution you’re unfamiliar with.
The great thing is that there are numerous free software options for keeping a trading journal online to choose from, so you don’t need to break the bank. As a disclaimer though these platforms will, to some extent, keep track of your trading performance and trade history, many of them severely restrict your ability to keep track of previous trades.
With that in mind we’ll cover two of these free trading solutions that are our favorites. For a more in-depth and extensive list you can check out this best free trading journals review by modestmoney.
TraderVue
TraderVue’s “Basic Plan” is completely free to use for as long as you need it. Although not as extensive as a monthly subscription to their full platform, the “Basic Plan” allows you access to a variety of information. Making it it useful for day trading stocks, options, forex, and futures across a variety of financial markets.
Additionally, it keeps log of your trading history, so you’ll be able to decipher your own patterns. If you choose to upgrade to a paid plan eventually these will become more apparent, especially as they start tracking more of your trades.
As an important note, their “Basic Plan” allows for the tracking of up to 30 trades per month. So it’s a great way to dip your toe into trading journals, but if you’re looking to become an active day trader, the amount of tracking will likely not be enough.
TradeMetria
TradeMetria is another excellent trading journal especially for aspiring day traders. You can import up to 30 trades per month with the free version, something you might run out of in a short amount of time. That being said the platform highlights individual trades, isolating effective ones from the “needs-improvement” ones. Meaning you can adapt your strategy pretty quickly.
On top of that you get access to historical performance data, analytics, metrics, and portfolio tracking are some notable features of the free plan.
It offers a comparable amount of tracked assets including stock options, futures, forex, cryptocurrencies, and CFDs. However, it does leave quite a bit behind it’s paid gate.
How long will a free trading journal last me?
Ultimately the value you get out of any journal is going to be highly dependent on your use. But in general terms free trading journals won’t last you forever, nor should they. Their objective is to help you become a better trader, which means higher earnings. So, realistically that’s how long they should last, just until you’re able to start making a consistent return.
Once you’ve accomplished that you’ll be ready to move onto a paid trading journal. If your curious as to some of our favorite ones, then you can check out this article on the best trading journals. Something to keep in mind is that most of the paid trading journals, have a monthly fee instead of annual and some are even tiered, depending on your needs. This includes the paid version of TraderVue and TradeMetria.
The best low budget trading journal
As a bridge between the advanced analytics of a monthly subscription paid trading journal and free one, Edgewonk is probably the best middle-ground.
Edgewonk charges annually as opposed to monthly unlike many other software solutions. If you are just getting started with your trading business, this is great news because it makes it easy to figure out your annual costs. They offer essentially a just upgraded version of the free software’s and allow for unlimited trade tracking. Meaning you could do a limitless number of trades per day and get insights on each one of them.
Edgewonk just like the more expensive plans, gives you access to a wide range of asset types, including stocks, futures, forex, CFDs, commodities, and cryptocurrency, trade analytics, performance tracking, backtesting, to name some.
It does not offer as in-depth analytics as some other tools, however, if you’re just starting out it provides more than enough information to help you tangibly improve.
All for the industry low price of $169 per year! Which is averages out to about $14 a month.
If you’re interested in finding more about the platform we suggest you read an Edgewonk review to get a better feel for how the platform can help you improve your trading.