Why Journal at All?
A trading journal is not a diary. It is a record you can query later — a way to find out whether your edge is real, where it breaks down, and what you are actually doing versus what you think you are doing. Most traders overestimate how well they remember their own trades. A journal replaces memory with data.
For futures traders specifically, journaling matters more than it does for a buy-and-hold equity investor, for one reason: futures trading generates a lot of small, fast decisions. Entries, exits, size adjustments, and re-entries happen inside single sessions, sometimes inside single minutes. Without a record, those decisions blur together into a vague sense of "today was good" or "today was bad" — not the specific, actionable detail that actually improves a process.
This guide covers what to record, a workable way to record it by hand, how often to review it, and what to look for when you do. Automation comes up near the end, because it is a real part of the answer for traders running futures accounts — but the method comes first.
What to Record for Every Trade
A useful futures journal captures the same core fields for every trade, every time. Skipping fields "because it was an obvious trade" is exactly how journals become unreliable — the trades you don't bother logging are often the ones most worth reviewing.
- Entry price, exit price, and contract (e.g. MNQ, ES, CL) — futures move in ticks with a fixed dollar value per tick, so the contract identity is part of the record, not an afterthought.
- Size — how many contracts, on that specific trade. If you scaled in or out, log each fill, not just the net.
- Fees and commissions — futures commissions are per contract, per side, and they compound fast across many small trades. A trade that looks profitable on price alone can be a loser after round-turn costs.
- Setup or strategy tag — a short label for what you thought you were doing (e.g. "opening range breakout," "pullback to VWAP"). Without this, you cannot later ask "which setups are actually working?"
- Session or time of day — futures markets behave differently in the overnight session, the cash open, midday, and the close. Time-of-day context turns a flat list of trades into something you can slice and compare.
- Reason for entry and reason for exit — one line each, written at the time, not reconstructed afterward. Reconstructed reasoning tends to be flattering; real-time notes are not.
- Result in ticks/points and in dollars — both. Ticks tell you about execution and setup quality; dollars tell you about account impact once size and contract value are factored in.
A Workable Manual Baseline
You do not need software to start journaling well. A spreadsheet with one row per trade and the columns above is a legitimate starting point, and plenty of traders run this for months before deciding whether to change anything.
The practical failure points of a spreadsheet are predictable, and worth naming honestly rather than glossing over:
- Tick-to-dollar math has to be done manually for every contract you trade, and it is easy to make a sign error or use the wrong point value, especially when switching between a mini and a micro contract mid-session.
- Fees are easy to forget or estimate roughly instead of pulling the actual per-fill commission, which quietly distorts your win rate and profit factor.
- Logging happens after the fact, from memory or from scrolling back through platform history, which means details fade or get skipped on busy days — and busy days are often the most instructive ones.
- A single spreadsheet does not scale cleanly once you are trading more than one account: keeping per-account rows straight, without cross-contaminating P&L between accounts, takes real spreadsheet discipline.
Honest framing
A spreadsheet is a real, workable way to journal futures trades. It just puts the entire burden of accuracy — the math, the fee lookup, the discipline to log every trade — on you, every single day.
Review Cadence: Daily and Weekly
A journal that is never reviewed is just a log file. The review is where the value gets extracted, and it works best on a fixed cadence rather than "whenever I feel like it."
- Daily (about 10 minutes): Read through the day's trades in order. Did each entry match the setup you tagged? Note anything that stands out — a trade taken outside your usual session window, a size that was larger than normal, an exit that was clearly emotional rather than planned. You are not re-grading every trade — you are looking for one or two things worth remembering tomorrow.
- Weekly (30-45 minutes): Look at the week as a set. Group trades by setup tag and by session. Which setups had more winners than losers? Which time-of-day window produced the worst average result? Are your losing trades clustering around a specific contract, a specific hour, or a specific emotional state (revenge-sizing after a loss is a common pattern worth checking for explicitly)?
What to Look For When You Review
A review is only useful if you know what questions you are asking. A few that consistently surface something actionable:
- Is my average win bigger than my average loss, and is that ratio stable or drifting?
- Are my losses concentrated in one setup, one contract, or one time window — or spread evenly?
- How much of my monthly result comes from a small number of large trades, versus a steady accumulation of small ones? A result that depends on one outlier trade is a fragile result.
- Do my written entry/exit reasons still make sense a day later, or do they read like justifications after the fact?
- What does my fee drag look like as a percentage of gross P&L? On high-frequency futures trading, this number is often larger than traders expect.
Where Automation Helps, Specifically for Futures
Futures trading has a few characteristics that make automated journaling meaningfully more useful than in slower-paced markets: contracts have fixed point values that must be applied correctly on every trade, commissions are charged per contract per side and add up quickly, and active futures traders frequently run more than one account — an evaluation, a funded account, sometimes several of each.
MimikTrader's journal is built around connected broker accounts: once an account is connected, every trade on that account is captured automatically from your broker fills — entries, exits, size, and the reconciled P&L, tick math and fees included. Trades are tagged with the account they came from, so if you are running multiple funded accounts, you can review each one individually or see the pattern across all of them at once.
On top of the captured trade data, the journal adds the metrics that matter for review: a P&L calendar, profit factor, expectancy, win rate, and max drawdown, plus session and time-of-day breakdowns so you can answer the same questions this guide walks through — without doing the tick math or the fee lookups by hand. The journal is included with the Pro plan. See the full feature breakdown on the futures trading journal page, or the trading journal hub for an overview of the underlying tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long before a futures journal is actually useful? Give it at least a few weeks and a reasonable sample of trades before drawing conclusions. A handful of trades will not tell you whether a setup has a real edge — sample size matters more than most traders want it to.
Should I journal losing trades the same way as winning trades? Yes, and arguably more carefully. Losing trades are where the useful information tends to live — sizing mistakes, setups that don't hold up, exits taken for the wrong reason.
Do I need to track every single scratch trade? Yes. Small, forgettable trades are often where bad habits hide — oversizing, chasing, revenge trades. Excluding them defeats the purpose of the review.
What is expectancy, and why does it show up in journal reviews? Expectancy is the average amount you can expect to win or lose per trade, accounting for both your win rate and your average win/loss size. See the glossary entry on expectancy for the full definition and formula.
Is journaling included on the Starter plan? No — the journal and reporting tools are part of the Pro plan.
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