Crypto trading journal: what to track and which numbers matter
A journal turns “I think I’m doing fine” into numbers. Here is what to record for each trade, which metrics are worth watching, and why spreadsheets usually get abandoned after a bad week.
What to record for every trade
- Date and time of entry and exit
- Pair, side (long or short), size and leverage
- Entry and exit price
- Fees and funding — they are part of the result
- Net PnL
- Why you entered: the setup, as a short tag
- Mistakes, if any: early exit, moved stop, revenge trade — also as tags
- A screenshot of the chart and a sentence about how you felt
Tags matter more than long notes: after a hundred trades they show which setups make money and which mistakes cost the most.
Which numbers matter
- Win rate — the share of profitable trades. On its own it says little: you can win 70% of trades and still lose money if the losses are bigger.
- Average win vs average loss (risk/reward) — tells whether your winners pay for your losers.
- Profit factor — total profit divided by total loss. Above 1 means the strategy earns.
- Maximum drawdown — the deepest fall from a peak of your equity. It shows how painful the strategy is to hold.
- Breakdowns — by coin, weekday, hour, side and holding time. This is where you find that, for example, all your losses come from night trades or one coin.
Why spreadsheets get abandoned
Manual journals break on the details: partial closes, funding, fees on every fill, trades on several exchanges. Each entry takes minutes, mistakes creep in, and after a bad week nobody wants to type in their losses — exactly when the journal is most useful.
See these numbers for your own trades
Connect an exchange and your trades load automatically — PnL, fees and funding per trade. The demo works without signing up.
A weekly review in 15 minutes
- Look at the week’s result with fees and funding.
- Find the three worst trades and the tags on them.
- Check the breakdown by hour and coin: is there a pattern?
- Pick one rule for next week — for example, “no trades after midnight”.
How CheckMyProfit helps
Connect Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget, MEXC, Gate.io, BingX or Hyperliquid and your trades load automatically: a candlestick chart with entry and exit for every trade, notes, tags and screenshots, win rate, profit factor, drawdown and breakdowns, plus a Telegram bot that sends a card when a trade closes. The free plan covers one exchange and three months of history.