Trading Journal vs Spreadsheet, Notion or Screenshots

The two questions that decide it

Whatever you use, only two things really matter.

Will you keep it up? A journal you abandon in week two teaches you nothing. Most journals die because they ask for too much on the day you least want to look at the trade.

Does it store the reasons, not just the result? If all you keep is entry, exit and profit, you have a record of what happened and no way to find out why. The questions worth asking later are about what you saw before you got in.

Hold each of the four options against those two questions and the differences get clear quickly.

A spreadsheet

What it is good at. It is free, it is yours, and it bends to whatever you want. You can add a column for any condition you check and fill it in with a yes or a no. Sort, filter, and you have your answer. Plenty of traders have built a real understanding of their trading in a spreadsheet, and nothing on this page says otherwise.

Where it runs out. Tidiness. You write “trend up” one week and “bullish” the next, and six months later those count as two different things. Comparing combinations gets fiddly fast: one condition is a filter, two needs a pivot table (a summary table you build from the rows), and with three you are writing formulas on a Sunday. And a spreadsheet will happily show you a beautiful number from six trades without ever mentioning that it came from six trades.

Pick it if you like spreadsheets, you keep your own naming strict, and you would rather own the file than pay for anything.

A template you fill in on a page

The kind of thing you buy or copy as a ready-made setup, with a page per trade, a few tables and a dashboard.

What it is good at. It looks good, and looking good matters more than traders admit: a journal you enjoy opening is a journal you keep. It is quick to start, because someone else already decided the fields. There is room for notes, images and thinking, which a grid of numbers does not give you.

Where it runs out. The fields are someone else’s, and they are usually built around the result. Counting across hundreds of entries is the part these tools are weakest at, so the dashboard ends up showing totals rather than answers. And you are tied to whichever app the template was written for.

Pick it if you already live in that app, you want to start today, and your main aim is the habit rather than the counting.

A folder of screenshots

What it is good at. It is the fastest thing there is. One key, and the chart at the moment you entered is saved forever. Nothing else keeps the context of a trade so completely, and going back through them is genuinely good for learning to read a chart.

Where it runs out. You cannot count pictures. You cannot ask two hundred screenshots whether your trades did better when the bigger chart was trending. To answer anything, you would have to open them one by one and write down what you see, which is the work you avoided by taking the screenshot.

Pick it if you use it alongside something else. As the whole journal it caps out quickly.

A journal app with statistics

The kind that pulls your trades in from your broker and shows a dashboard: win rate, average win, average loss, best day, best market.

What it is good at. The trades get in with almost no work from you, which solves the habit problem better than anything else. The numbers are right, the charts are clean, and the tax-time export alone is worth something. Many of these let you tag trades, and a tag you apply carefully is the same idea as a condition you tick.

Where it runs out. Your broker knows the entry, the exit and the size. It does not know what you checked before you clicked, so anything about your reasons still has to be typed in by you, after the fact, when memory has already started tidying the story. And a dashboard describes what happened; it does not compare your trades with one thing against your trades without it. That last step is where the learning is, and most dashboards leave it to you.

Pick it if you trade often, you want the record to keep itself, and the reporting is what you are after.

Where EdgeFlow fits

EdgeFlow is the fourth kind with the missing half built in. You tick the things you checked before the trade, in your own words, and it compares your trades that had each one with your trades that did not, including combinations of them, and puts the number of trades next to every answer. When a group is too small to mean anything, it says it is too early to tell. Out of that comes a written plan you can freeze and test on the trades that follow.

Being fair about the other side: EdgeFlow does not connect live to your broker. Trades come in through a file import or by hand, and ticking the conditions is a few seconds of work per trade that a spreadsheet would not ask of you either. If all you want is a clean record of results, a statistics journal will do that with less effort, and there is nothing wrong with choosing it.

The longer answer to what that counting looks like is on which trading journal helps you build an edge.

So which one should you use?

Start with whichever you will actually open tomorrow. A notebook you use beats software you do not.

Then make sure whatever you picked has room for the things you checked before you entered, and use the same words for them every time. That one habit is what decides whether your journal can answer a question in six months, and it costs nothing in any of the four.

How to keep a trading journal has the short version that survives a bad week, whichever tool you land on.

Common questions

Where to go next

• Which trading journal helps you build an edge?
• What to track in a trading journal
• The EdgeFlow trading journal
• Who makes EdgeFlow