A day trading journal built around the session

Why day traders need a different journal

A swing trader might log four trades a week. A day trader can log forty before lunch. At that volume, a spreadsheet stops being a journal and becomes a chore you skip on the days you most needed it - the red ones.

Intraday results also hide inside time. The same setup can pay at 9:45 and bleed at 11:30 because liquidity, volatility and your own attention all change through the session. A day trading journal has to be able to answer "when do I trade well?" as easily as "what do I trade well?".

What to track on every intraday trade

• Entry and exit time - to the minute. Hour-of-day and hold-time breakdowns are built from these.
• Planned risk - the dollar amount you decided to lose before you entered. Everything else is measured against it.
• Setup - opening range break, VWAP reclaim, pullback, whatever your playbook calls it.
• Mistake - chased, moved stop, sized up after a loss, traded outside your plan. One tag, honestly applied.
• A screenshot of the entry and the exit, so a review is looking at the chart, not your memory of it.

The four reports that change how day traders trade

Results by hour. The most common single finding: a trader's first hour carries the day and the late morning gives part of it back. Seeing that in numbers is usually enough to write a rule - "no new positions after 11:00" - and keep it.

Results by setup. Most traders run three to six setups and believe they are all profitable. Usually one or two are, and the rest are expensive habits.

R distribution. Whether your winners are larger than your losers in units of what you risked, not in dollars that swing with position size.

Trades after a loss. Revenge trading has a signature: shorter holds, larger size, worse outcome, all within minutes of a red trade. A journal that tags mistakes shows you how often it happens and what it costs.

How TradeReview AI handles a day trader's volume

Import the day's fills from your broker as a CSV - or connect a supported broker on Pro and let them arrive on their own - with entry and exit times intact. Tag setups and mistakes, attach screenshots, and the dashboard updates: profit factor, expectancy, drawdown, win rate against your break-even win rate, and the breakdowns by hour, weekday, setup, mistake and hold time.

Trade replay steps back through a session in the order you took it, which is where patterns like "three trades in six minutes after the first stop-out" become impossible to ignore.

A ten-minute end-of-day routine

1. Import the session.
2. Tag each trade's setup and, where it applies, the mistake.
3. Look at the best and worst trade of the day in replay.
4. Write one sentence: what you will do differently tomorrow.

Done daily, that routine produces a year of evidence about your own trading. Skipped on red days, it produces a flattering record of your green ones.

Questions

Is this day trading journal free?

Yes. Unlimited trades, CSV import, the full dashboard including hour-of-day and setup breakdowns, screenshots, trade replay and PDF reports are free with no card. AI coaching, AI agents and automatic broker sync are on paid plans.

Can it handle dozens of trades a day?

Yes. There is no trade cap, and a whole session imports from your broker's export in one go.

Does it work for futures and options day trading?

Yes. Stocks, ETFs, options with strike and expiry, futures, forex and crypto can all be logged, and results are compared in R so different instruments sit on the same scale.

How is this different from my broker's P/L report?

Your broker records fills. A journal records intent: the risk you planned, the setup you took, and the mistake you made. Those are the fields that explain the P/L instead of just reporting it.