Excel Trading Journal Template

Every professional trader knows that journaling is important for tracking your progress and improving your strategies.

Traditionally, traders would keep an actual diary of their trades and write them down using pen and paper.

While some still do this, my excel trading journal template takes away the pen and paper and allows for traders to use an already created excel template to track different strategies, see on average how long they are holding their winners/losers, and so much more. The key to a long and successful trading career is finding consistency and I truly believe my trading journal template will help with just that.

This template was designed with options traders in mind and will work with any broker (Fidelity, Tastyworks, TD Ameritrade, Schwab, Interactive Brokers, etc.). For Futures and Forex traders this template is highly customizable and can be tweaked to your preference.

How The Spreadsheet works

Main

The ‘Main’ sheet is the one that you will be looking at 99.9% of the time. This is where you enter all your trades and where all the data is displayed in different tables, charts etc. So everything, you need is on this sheet.

Data

There is really no reason for you to ever look at the ‘Data’ sheet. It only exists to track different data and keep track of the results of different calculations. Do not try to edit this! Otherwise, the entire spreadsheet might stop working. The ‘Data’ sheet can be seen as the backend of the Excel trading journal template.

Sort

Last but not least, we have the ‘Sort’ sheet. This sheet keeps track of the data for the total P&L graph on the ‘Main’ sheet. Once in a while, the total P&L chart might lose track of the chronology of some trades. To fix this, the ‘Sort’ sheet exists. It requires a very simple action to fix the small error. All you have to do is go to the ‘Sort’ sheet by clicking on ‘Sort’ at the bottom of the template.

General Tips

1. Try to always fill out these cells when entering a new trade: entry date/time, exit date/time, Entry P., Exit P., Size, Com., Ticker. Otherwise, certain things might not work.
2. I can’t recommend editing any formulas because this will usually start a chain reaction which will lead to many errors.
3. Enter the trades chronologically. Some things might not work if the exit dates aren’t in chronological order.
4. The standard contract size for options is 100. This is automatically calculated in the options trading section. So if you traded 1 contract, don’t enter 100. Just enter 1.
5. If a cell has a small red triangle in the upper right corner, hover over it to read my comment. My comments usually are brief explanations of different things.
6. If a cell looks like this: “######”, it means that the cell isn’t big enough to display a number. To fix this, either change how the number is rounded (under the “Number” section in the menu bar) or increase the width of that column.

Lastly

I truly hope that this guide will clarify any confusion about how to use different features of the Excel trading journal template. A lot of the things explained in this guide are also explained directly on the template (in form of comments) so that you don’t always have to go to this guide if you are unsure about something.

If you have Excel specific questions, I highly recommend looking at suggestions inside of Excel because Excel has a very big and helpful database of explanations and help. Furthermore, small errors can often be fixed by a quick Google search. Otherwise, always feel free to contact me!