Actal is my trading journal. It grades your discipline, finds the mistakes you keep paying for, and makes you fix them one at a time. Free to use. No card.
Other journals show you stats. Actal grades your discipline, finds what's costing you, and makes you fix it one thing at a time.
Most traders go looking for a free trading journal because they know they should be tracking their trades. Then the spreadsheet dies inside a month, because a list of numbers doesn't tell you what to do differently tomorrow. I built Actal to fix that. It grades the trade, not the money. A winner where you moved your stop gets a worse grade than a clean loser, because the winner is the one that blows up your account eventually.
If you've been searching for a free day trading journal, "trading journal free", or a journal that actually works with futures and prop accounts, this is it. Drop in the export from your platform, grade the session, see what your mistakes are costing you in dollars, and get one thing to fix this week. Free to use, no card. Built by a full-time futures trader for traders who want to get better, not just keep score.
Every trade gets an A to F. Not on P&L, on whether you followed your rules. Did the entry match the plan? Was the size right? Did the stop stay where you put it?
This is the part most journals get backwards. They celebrate the green trade and bury the red one, so you end up reinforcing whatever happened to work that day. Actal grades execution. Over a few weeks you stop caring about the daily number and start caring about the grade, and that's exactly when the daily number starts to take care of itself.
Set your daily loss limit, max trades, cooldown after a loss, and trading window once. Every import gets checked against them and you see exactly which trades you shouldn't have taken.
Rules are easy to write and easy to forget at 10:40 when you're down two trades and the market looks like it owes you something. The journal doesn't forget. Stopping at your limit counts as kept. The trades you take after the line are the break, and they show up on the trade and on your calendar, so you see the pattern before your prop firm does.
Not a chart to squint at. A sentence, the trades behind it, and the dollar figure. Broke your loss limit? That's finding number one.
When a mistake has a price tag, it stops being a personality trait and becomes a line item. That changes how seriously you take it. Rule breaks come first, then process gaps, then P&L patterns, and every finding shows the trades behind it. Lucky wins on ugly trades get flagged too, because the market teaching you the wrong lesson is the most expensive thing that can happen to a breakeven trader.
Not ten things. One. Picked from your findings, tracked every day, sitting at the top of your dashboard until it's fixed. Then the next one.
This is how I coach in the mentorship and it's the reason the journal exists. Traders who try to fix everything at once fix nothing. Traders who fix one thing a week are different traders in three months. The execution score at the end of the week tells you whether it actually got better, and it's about process, not P&L.
Five minutes after the close. That's the whole routine. Tuesday's mistake shows up in Friday's verdict.
Export the session from TradingView, NinjaTrader, Tradovate, Rithmic, TopstepX, Sierra Chart, MotiveWave, Quantower, ATAS, Interactive Brokers, or thinkorswim and drop the file in. Fills turn into round-trip trades. Import the same file twice and nothing doubles. Anything else goes through the CSV column mapper.
One screen per trade. Grade yourself A to F, tag what went wrong, draw on the chart, write the note. Keyboard all the way. Green trades that broke rules get marked down. That's the point.
Actal checks your own numbers against your rules and tells you what's costing you money, and how much. Rule breaks first, then process, then patterns. Every finding shows the trades behind it. Nothing gets made up.
Your most expensive mistake becomes the week's focus, tracked every day at the top of your dashboard. Trade the week, grade the sessions, watch the number drop. Friday's execution score tells you if it worked. Then the next one.
Most journals are built for stock traders and stretched to fit everyone else. I built this one at a futures desk, for the way futures and prop firm traders actually work.
If you're looking for a futures trading journal or a prop firm trading journal, the details matter. Contract point values for ES, NQ, YM, RTY and the micros are built in, so your R multiples and P&L are right without a lookup table. Evals, funded, sim, and live accounts sit side by side, each with its own view plus the combined one. And the rule that ends most prop firm evaluations, the daily loss limit, is checked on every single trade. Stop at the limit and it counts as kept. Take one more trade past the line and that trade is the break, on your calendar, with a dollar cost.
It doesn't matter if you're on Topstep, Apex, MyFundedFutures, or your own account. Export from your platform and drop the file in.
Two Apex evals, one Topstep funded account, and a sim you're testing a new setup on. Each one is its own account in Actal with its own grades, rules, and stats, and you can see them together. Files that mix accounts or scaled prices are handled on import.
Set it once, in R or in dollars. Every import gets checked. The trade that crossed the line is flagged on the trade itself and on the calendar, with what it cost. After a few weeks you'll know exactly how many evaluations you've paid for with one extra trade.
MES, MNQ, ES, NQ, YM, RTY, CL, GC and the rest come with their point values. R multiples, expectancy, and payoff are calculated from your actual fills, and you can override any contract if you trade something unusual.
Most futures traders make their money in the first two hours and give it back in the chop after. Set a trading window and the journal tells you what the trades outside it cost you. That number is usually the fastest fix in the whole journal.
A free trading journal template you can open in Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers. Same columns Actal uses, so the day you outgrow the spreadsheet, the file imports straight in.
Plenty of traders search for a trading journal template, a trading journal for Excel, or a trading journal in Google Sheets because a spreadsheet feels like the honest place to start. Fair. So here's mine, with the three columns most templates leave out: whether the trade was in your plan, whether your rules were kept, and a grade on the process. Three example trades are filled in so you can see how I grade.
datesymbolsidecontractsentry_timeexit_timeentry_priceexit_pricenet_pnlr_multipleaccountsetupplanned_traderules_keptmistakesgradenote
One honest warning. A spreadsheet will log your trades. It will not add up what "moved stop" cost you this month, it will not notice you've broken your cooldown rule three Tuesdays running, and it will not pick the one thing to fix this week. That's the gap Actal exists to close. Use the template until it annoys you, then drop the same file into Actal's column mapper.
There are good free trading journals out there. Most of them are stats pages. Here's the honest difference.
| Journal | Free plan | Built around | Grades discipline | Prices each mistake | One weekly focus |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actal | Free to use. Unlimited accounts and history, no card. | Fixing execution: rules, grades, findings | Yes, A to F on every trade | Yes, in dollars | Yes |
| TradesViz | Free tier, up to 3,000 executions a month | Stats and AI analytics, 600+ metrics | No | No | No |
| Tradervue | Free plan, first 100 trades a month | Auto import and reporting | No | No | No |
| Trademetria | Free plan, 30 orders a month, one account | Stats and calendar | No | No | No |
| Stonk Journal | Free, unlimited manual entries | Manual logging, offline | No | No | No |
| Spreadsheet | Free, forever, until you stop filling it in | Whatever formulas you write | Only if you grade by hand | No | No |
Free plan limits as published on each product's site, checked September 2026. If one changed, tell me and I'll fix it. Deeper comparisons on the Actal site: vs Tradervue, vs TradeZella, vs Edgewonk, vs a spreadsheet.
Whether you use Actal, a spreadsheet, or a notebook, this is the routine I put every mentorship student on.
Instrument, side, size, entry and exit, net P&L, R multiple, the setup, and three honest yes or no answers: was it in the plan, were the rules kept, was there a mistake. The trades you're tempted to leave out are the only ones worth logging.
A to F on whether you did what you said you'd do. A clean loss is a B. A sloppy win that broke a rule is a D, and it goes in the journal as a D no matter how green the day was. This one habit separates traders who improve from traders who just collect stats.
Add up what "moved stop" cost you. Then "traded outside window." Then "revenge entry." Sort by cost. The top one is your weekly review and your only focus for the next five sessions. Not the top three. The top one.
A pre-market plan with a bias and A, B, C scenarios takes ten minutes. The evening close-out takes two: which scenario played, did you trade it. Over a month, "traded against the plan" becomes a number, and that number is usually your whole problem.
No catch. Actal is free to use, everything unlocked, unlimited accounts and history, no card. Early users lock in a founder's price for life if a paid plan ever launches, so the earlier you're in, the better the deal you keep.
Most journals are a stats page with a login. They show you what happened and leave the fixing to you, at 4pm, tired, flipping through fifty charts. Actal grades your discipline. Every trade gets an A to F on rule adherence, not profit. It then finds the mistakes you keep repeating, puts a dollar number on each, and gives you one thing to fix this week. The stats are still there. They're the by-product, not the point.
TradingView, NinjaTrader, MotiveWave, Sierra Chart, Tradovate, Rithmic, Quantower, TopstepX, ATAS, Interactive Brokers, and thinkorswim, each with a step-by-step export guide. Any other CSV, including a spreadsheet you built, goes through the column mapper. You export from your platform and drop the file in. There's no live broker sync yet, it's on the list. Evals, funded, sim, and live accounts sit side by side.
No. Actal is open to any trader. My mentorship students use it alongside daily coaching, where I look at their grades and findings with them, but the journal itself is free for everyone. You can also add a friend or a mentor and they see your journal and can comment on any trade. Hard to lie to yourself when someone is watching.
Futures, currencies, and options, across live accounts and prop firm accounts. I built it as an index futures trader (ES, NQ, YM, RTY), so if you day trade futures it fits like a glove. Contract point values are built in for the common futures and micros. The grading and rule tracking work the same for anything you can import.
Yes, this one. I built Actal at a futures desk for futures and prop firm accounts. Evals, funded, sim, and live accounts sit side by side, point values for ES, NQ, YM, RTY and the micros are built in, and the daily loss limit rule that ends most evaluations is checked on every trade. Free to use.
Yes. Export your fills from TopstepX, Tradovate, NinjaTrader, or Rithmic and drop the file in. Apex and the other prop firms that run on Tradovate or Rithmic import the same way. Each platform has a step-by-step export guide inside Actal, and importing the same file twice doesn't double anything.
Whichever one you'll actually fill in after the close. A spreadsheet is fine for logging, and the free template above is a good one. What it can't do is add up what each mistake cost you or pick the one thing to fix this week. That's the part that changes your trading, and that's what Actal does. Start with the template if you like; it imports straight in later.
For every trade: instrument, side, size, entry and exit time and price, net P&L and R multiple, the setup, whether it was in the plan, whether your rules were kept, any mistake, a grade on the process, and a one-line note. Weekly: the one mistake that cost the most and what you're doing about it. Monthly: what actually changed. If your journal only has the first half of that list, it's a trade log, not a trading journal.
Yes. It's a mobile web app with its own layout, built to be used from the couch after the close. Import on your desktop, grade the session with your thumb, draw on the chart with a finger, check your weekly focus on the way to the desk in the morning. No native app yet.
Actal shows you the leak. The mentorship is me sitting with you every day until it's closed.