The free forex trading journal for MT4 and MT5 traders

Forex looks simple until you try to journal it. The same 0.50 lots is worth a different amount on every pair, and the account is often not in dollars. A journal that gets these wrong gives you a wrong P&L, and every number after that is wrong too.

• Pip values per pair. A pip on EURUSD is $10 a lot, on USDJPY it depends on the yen price, on gold it depends on the broker's contract size. A journal that makes you type a pip value per symbol, or guesses, will drift from your broker's numbers.
• Swap. Hold a trade overnight and swap is added or taken. Over a month of swing trades it adds up, and it belongs to the trade, not to a separate line.
• Commission. ECN and prop firm accounts charge per lot. That's part of the cost of every trade.
• Partial closes and hedging. MT5 can hold two opposite positions on the same pair, and closing half a position is normal. Trades have to stay separate, not get merged into one.
• Server time. MetaTrader writes times in the broker's server time, often two or three hours ahead of London. Your session stats are only right if that's handled.
• Deposits and cancelled orders. They sit in the same statement as your trades and have to be left out.

Actal gets around the first problem by not calculating anything. MetaTrader already states the profit of every trade in your account currency, so Actal takes that number, adds the swap and counts the commission as the cost. Forex, gold, indices, oil and crypto CFDs are right from the first import. The import was tested on real MT4 and MT5 statements, and the totals match the statement to the cent.

• MT4: open the Terminal (Ctrl+T), go to Account History, right-click and pick the period, then right-click again and choose Save as Report. You get an .htm file.
• MT5: open the Toolbox (Ctrl+T), go to the History tab, pick the period, right-click and choose Report, and save it as HTML.
• Drop the file on Actal's import page and pick the account it belongs to. The preview shows every trade before anything is saved.
• Next week, do the same. Trades you already imported are skipped, so you can save a whole month again without doubling anything.

The full steps, with what the file should look like and what to do when something's off, are on the MT4 and MT5 page. On another platform, like cTrader or DXtrade, export whatever trade history CSV it offers and name the columns once in the column mapper. It remembers the mapping for next time.

The import gives you the numbers. The part that makes you better is what you add after the session, and it doesn't have to take long.

• The setup. Which of your setups was it, or was it none of them.
• A grade on execution. Did you follow your plan: entry, stop, size, exit. Grade that, not whether it made money.
• The mistake, if there was one. Moved the stop, lotted up, traded into news, took a trade in a session you don't trade.
• The session. London, New York or Asia. Most forex traders have one session that pays and one that costs.
• A screenshot of the chart with your entry and exit, if you want to look back at it later.

Do that for a few weeks and the patterns show up on their own. The trades you graded C and below usually cost more than all your losers at A. That's the whole point of grading the execution separately from the P&L.

The mistakes that end forex accounts are almost always the same few: lotting up after a loss, trading on after the daily limit, and holding a loser because the stop was moved. These are the rules to set, and Actal checks every imported trade against them.

Work out the lot size for your risk with the pip calculator, then set that as your max. If you trade a prop firm challenge like FTMO, set the firm's daily loss limit as a rule too, so every day you went past it shows up with what it cost.

• MT4 and MT5 import, with swap and commission per trade. TradingView imports directly too, and any other platform's CSV goes through the column mapper.
• A review screen per trade: grade, mistakes, tags, notes and a chart you can draw on.
• Risk rules checked on every trade: lot size, daily and weekly loss limits, max trades, cooldowns, trading hours.
• A premarket plan and a daily review, with templates you can change.
• A weekly execution score, a dollar cost for every mistake, and one thing to fix each week.
• Several accounts side by side: a demo, a challenge, a funded account and a live account.
• Friends and groups who can see your journal. No card, no trade limit.

What it doesn't do yet: live sync with MetaTrader, backtesting, or showing amounts in a currency other than dollars. A EUR or GBP account imports fine and the totals are right, but they're shown with a $ sign for now.

I'm Joakim. I trade index futures full time and coach traders one-on-one at Jusell Trading Academy. I don't trade forex myself, but the review loop is the same whatever you trade: a plan, rules, a grade on execution and a price on every mistake. The MetaTrader import was built and tested on real MT4 and MT5 statements. Actal is my product.