The free stock trading journal for day traders
Your broker already shows your P&L. What it doesn't show is which trades were your setup, which ones broke your rules, and what the impulse trades cost you this month. This is what a stock trading journal has to get right, how to get your trades in for free, and what to look at once they're there.
The short version
If you day trade or swing trade stocks and want a journal that grades how well you followed your plan, not just your P&L, Actal is free during beta with no card and no trade limit. It imports from thinkorswim, Interactive Brokers and TradingView directly, and any other broker's CSV through a column mapper you set up once. It doesn't sync live and it doesn't journal options yet.
- You mostly trade options; option rows are skipped for now
- You want trades to arrive live from your broker without an export, and will pay for that
- You want backtesting or trade replay inside the journal
- You day trade or swing trade stocks and ETFs
- You want your daily loss limit, max trades and position size checked on every trade
- You want every mistake priced in dollars, and one thing to fix each week
- You want a free journal that's the whole product, not a trial
What a stock journal has to get right
Stocks are the easiest market to journal on paper: a share moves a dollar, you make a dollar. The hard part is the way brokers export trades.
- Fills into trades. Brokers export executions. Buy 300 in two fills, sell in three, and that's one trade. A journal has to pair them into round trips with the right average prices, or your win rate means nothing.
- Partial fills and scaling. The same order can fill in seven pieces at the same price. They belong to one trade.
- Shorts. A sell to open and a buy to close is a short trade, not a loss followed by a win.
- Positions that started before the file. If your export starts halfway through a trade, the journal has to say so instead of inventing a trade.
- Commission. Many brokers charge nothing, some charge per share. When the export has fees, they belong to the trade.
Actal rebuilds round trips from your fills and prices stocks per share, so there's nothing to set up per ticker. It was tested on a real thinkorswim statement: a 2,000 share short covered in eight fills comes out as one trade, and the P&L matches the fills to the cent.
Getting your trades in
| Broker or platform | What to export |
|---|---|
| thinkorswim (Schwab) | Monitor, Account Statement, Export to file. The Account Trade History section is read. |
| Interactive Brokers | An Activity Flex Query with the Trades section at execution level, as CSV. |
| TradingView | The Trading panel's Account History or order history, from a connected broker or paper trading. |
| Quantower | The Trades panel, Export data. |
| Webull, Robinhood, Fidelity, E*TRADE and others | Any trade or order history CSV. Name the columns once in the column mapper and it's remembered for next time. |
Each supported platform has step-by-step export instructions on the brokers page. Importing the same file twice never doubles a trade, so exporting a whole month again is safe.
What to journal on a stock trade
- The setup. Gap and go, breakout, pullback, whatever you actually trade. If it wasn't one of them, that's worth knowing too.
- A grade on execution. Entry, stop, size and exit against your plan. Grade that, not whether it made money.
- The mistake, if there was one. Chased the entry, added to a loser, held past the stop, traded the first minute when you said you wouldn't.
- The time of day. Most day traders have an hour that pays and an hour that gives it back.
- Why you took it, in one line. Read those back after a month and you'll see which reasons work.
The trades you grade C and below usually cost more than all the losers you took at A. Once you can see that in dollars, it's much easier to stop taking them.
Rules that stop the expensive mistakes
| Rule | What it catches |
|---|---|
| Daily loss limit | Every trade taken after you were already past your limit for the day |
| Max trades per day | The overtrading day that started with a good trade |
| Max position size (shares) | The 2,000 share trade when your normal is 500 |
| Cooldown after a loss | The trade taken two minutes after a stop-out |
| Trading window | Trades in the first minutes after the open, or after lunch, if those are off limits |
| Allowed symbols | Trades in tickers that weren't on your watchlist |
Actal checks every imported trade against these rules. The broken ones show up on the day they happened, with what they cost. For more on the rule that matters most after a loss, read how to stop revenge trading.
What you get free during beta
- Imports from thinkorswim, Interactive Brokers, TradingView and Quantower, and any other CSV through the column mapper. Futures, forex and crypto too, if you trade those.
- A review screen per trade: grade, mistakes, tags, notes and a chart you can draw on.
- Risk rules checked on every trade.
- 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, and friends or groups who can see your journal. No card, no trade limit.
What it doesn't do yet: live sync with your broker, options, or backtesting. If you want to start on paper first, the free trading journal template works in Excel and Google Sheets.
Who wrote this
I'm Joakim. I trade index futures full time and coach traders one-on-one at Jusell Trading Academy. The review loop I use with students works the same on stocks: a plan, rules, a grade on execution and a price on every mistake. Actal is my product, and the thinkorswim stock import was tested on a real statement.
Questions people ask
Drop in one export. In a minute Actal grades the trades it can, prices the mistakes you tagged, and tells you the first thing to fix. Free during beta, no card.
Full-time index futures trader. Coaches traders one-on-one at Jusell Trading Academy, five students at a time, since 2020. No platform was built for developing traders, so he had his own coaching software built; old students loved it and kept coming back, and Actal is that software turned into a proper journal for what matters.