The free trading journal for futures traders

Free comes in four flavours. A spreadsheet or a Notion template is free forever and does everything by hand; the spreadsheet and Notion comparisons cover where each one stops. A free tier is a real plan with a cap on imports or features. A trial is a paid plan with a clock. And a beta is a full product before its price exists, which is what Actal is today.

Prices and limits from each product's site in September 2026. They change, so check before you sign up.

Futures break generic journals in ways stock traders never see, and most free options are generic. These are the things I check first with a new student's export, because if any of them is wrong every number downstream is wrong too.

• Round trips from fills. Your platform exports fills, not trades. Scaling in, scaling out, partial exits and flips have to be paired into round trips with the right average entry and exit, or your win rate is fiction. Actal's engine does this per account and symbol, prorates commissions across partial exits, and warns when a file starts with an exit it cannot pair.
• Point values and micros. An NQ point is $20 and an MNQ point is $2. A journal that treats them the same, or asks you to type the multiplier per trade, will not last a week. Actal has the common CME contracts and their micros built in, lets you override any of them, and refuses to guess on a symbol it does not know rather than silently getting it wrong.
• Contract months. NQZ25, NQH26 and NQ are the same instrument for every statistic that matters. Actal reads the month code so stats group by root while each trade keeps its exact contract.
• Scaled prices and mixed files. Sierra Chart exports some symbols at prices times 100; Rithmic and Tradovate files can carry several accounts. Actal detects the scaling, previews the fix, and keeps positions separate per account.
• Many accounts, one set of rules. An eval, a funded account and a sim are all you, so your risk rules and your grades should apply across them while the P&L stays separate. Actal treats each as an account under one journal.
• Day-first dates and decimal commas. Exports from a European NinjaTrader or Quantower install look different. Actal detects both per file instead of importing August into April.

• Import from NinjaTrader, Tradovate, Rithmic, Sierra Chart, MotiveWave, Quantower, TopstepX, ATAS, TradingView, Interactive Brokers, thinkorswim, MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, each with an export guide, or any CSV through the column mapper. Duplicates are skipped.
• A review screen per trade: A to F grade on discipline with your strategy's criteria as hints, mistakes and tags, chart drawing that stays editable, and a note. Keyboard all the way.
• Risk rules judged on every trade: loss limits per day and week, profit stop, give-back, max trades, cooldowns, consecutive losses, R size.
• A premarket plan with A, B and C scenarios per market, closed out every evening, and a daily review, both on templates you can rebuild field by field.
• The execution score for the week, a graded calendar, clean versus mistake trades, and every stat you would expect: expectancy, payoff, drawdown, hold time, hour of day, per setup and per account.
• Insights with a dollar cost, ranked rule breaks first, and one weekly focus with live progress.
• A monthly review with reflection, best and worst trades by grade, and goals.
• Friends who see your full journal and can comment, groups with a chat and a weekly execution board, public trade cards, PDF export.
• Unlimited accounts and unlimited history. No card.

What you do not get, so nobody is surprised: live broker sync (trades come in from your export file), backtesting, bar-by-bar replay, an AI chat, or a native mobile app. The mobile web app covers review, plan and daily review.

Actal is in beta. The product works and traders use it daily, but the importers are still being widened and the edges sanded, and I would rather have futures traders in now than after. So everything is unlocked, with no card and no trial clock. When the paid plan launches, beta users get first dibs on a founder's price locked in for life, well below what everyone after pays. Nothing you logged goes anywhere either way. That is the whole deal, and it is written on the beta page.

• Sign up and set your timezone. Every day boundary, calendar cell and hour-of-day stat depends on it.
• Add your accounts: eval, funded, sim, live. Each import lands in one of them.
• Add your risk rules once. From the next import on, every trade is checked.
• Add the setups you actually trade as strategies, with what makes an A. The grade keypad shows those criteria on review.
• Export a month of fills from your platform, following the guide for it, and drop the file in. Check the preview: symbols recognised, point values right, duplicates counted.
• Grade twenty trades. The insights page will name your most expensive mistake and what it cost.
• File tomorrow's plan before the open and close it out after. Do that for a week and read the execution score on Friday.

• Import one real month. If the win rate or the P&L does not match your platform, stop.
• Find the cap. Trades per month, accounts, history, features. Free tiers hide it in the plan table.
• Ask it what your most expensive mistake was last month. If the answer is a report you have to build, it is a dashboard.
• Check whether it asks for a plan before the open and closes it out after. Almost none do; that is the part that changes a trader.
• Read what happens when free ends. A price you can lock in now beats a price you find out later.

I trade index futures full time and coach futures traders one-on-one at Jusell Trading Academy, five at a time, since 2020. Every student starts by importing their real fills, which is where I learned what breaks. Actal is my product, and the figures about other tools are from their own sites in September 2026.