Trade Journal
The Trade Journal helps you reflect on your trading sessions and individual trades. By consistently journaling, you build a dataset of emotions, mistakes, setups, and market conditions that Echo Trader uses to surface performance patterns in your Metrics dashboard.
Getting Started
Navigate to Trade Journal in the sidebar. You'll see two sections:
- Calendar -- A monthly calendar view showing which days you've journaled. Days with a journal entry are marked with an icon so you can quickly see your journaling streak. Click any date to open or create that day's journal entry.
- Notebook -- A free-form notes section for longer-form observations, monthly/quarterly reviews, research, or anything that doesn't fit a specific session.
Daily Journal
Click a date on the calendar to open the daily journal for that session. Each daily journal includes:
Pre-Market Plan
Write your plan before the session starts. What setups are you watching? What are your rules for the day? Having a written plan makes it easier to evaluate whether you followed it after the session.
Session Notes
Reflect on how the session went. What worked? What would you do differently? You can paste TradingView chart links here -- the editor supports full Markdown formatting with bold, italic, headers, lists, blockquotes, and links.
Session Reflection
The reflection card captures structured data that powers your journal insights. Filling these out consistently will lead to better and deeper insights on your trading as it relates to your emotions, setups, chart patterns, etc:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Confidence | Rate your confidence level from 1 (Very Low) to 5 (Very High). |
| Followed Plan | Toggle whether you stuck to your pre-market plan. |
| Market Conditions | Tag the market environment (e.g., trending, choppy, high volatility). |
| Emotions | Tag the emotions you felt during the session (e.g., calm, frustrated, fomo). |
| Mistakes | Tag any mistakes you made (e.g., chased entry, moved stop, overtraded). |
| Trade Setups | Tag the setups you traded (e.g., breakout, reversal, vwap cross). |
| Screenshots | Upload chart screenshots to visually document your session. |
Click Save when you're done. The save button stays pinned to the top of the page so you can save at any point while scrolling.
Trades List
Below the journal content, you'll see all trades for that session. Each trade row shows the connection, account, symbol, action, quantity, entry/exit prices, P&L, and timestamps.
- A blue file icon next to a trade means it has a trade-level journal entry.
- Use the View Journaled Trades toggle to filter the list to only trades you've journaled.
- Click any trade row to open the trade-level journal.
Exporting Trades
Export appears on both the calendar and each day's journal page, and downloads your trades as a CSV.
The date range defaults to whatever you're looking at — the month on the calendar, or that single day on a journal page — and you can widen it in the popover, up to the 90 days of trade history that's retained. See Trade Log for the columns included.
Trade-Level Journal
Clicking a trade from the daily journal opens a dedicated journal page for that specific trade. This page shows:
- A summary card with the trade's symbol, side, quantity, entry/exit prices, timestamps, and P&L.
- A Trade Notes section with the same Markdown editor for reflecting on that specific trade.
- A Session Reflection card identical to the daily level, letting you tag emotions, mistakes, setups, and market conditions at the individual trade level.
Trade-level journaling is where the most granular insights come from. Tagging emotions, mistakes, setups, market conditions, etc. on individual trades helps you identify which specific patterns lead to your best and worst trades.
Tags
Tags are the foundation of journal insights. They're organized into four categories:
| Category | Purpose | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Emotions | How you felt during the session or trade | calm, frustrated, fomo, anxious |
| Mistakes | Errors you made | chased entry, no stop, moved stop, overtraded, ignored plan |
| Market Conditions | The market environment | trending, choppy, range bound, high volatility, low volume |
| Trade Setups | The strategy or pattern you traded | breakout, reversal, vwap cross |
Tags are created inline as you use them -- type a new tag name and it will be created automatically. Tags you've created appear as selectable options across all your journal entries.
Journal Insights
Once you've journaled 5 or more sessions, Journal Insights activates. It surfaces your best and worst performing tags, lets you break down performance by emotion, setup, mistake, market condition, and plan adherence, and supports filtering by tags, confidence, and plan. See the Metrics -- Journal Insights section for full details.
You'll find it in two places:
- At the bottom of the Trade Journal page, below the calendar — right where you do the journaling, so you can see what your entries are telling you without leaving the page.
- As a tile on the Metrics page, alongside your other performance tiles.
Both show the same data. The Metrics tile can be hidden or moved like any other tile.
Tips for Effective Journaling
- Write your pre-market plan before trading. This gives you something concrete to evaluate against.
- Journal immediately after your session. Details fade quickly -- capture them while they're fresh.
- Be honest with your tags. The insights are only as good as the data. Tag the emotions you actually felt, not the ones you wish you felt.
- Use trade-level journals for standout trades. You don't need to journal every trade, but consistently tagging your best and worst trades reveals the most useful patterns.
- Review your insights weekly. Check the Journal Insights tile on the Metrics page to see which patterns are helping or hurting your performance.