Almost everyone starts with a spreadsheet, and almost everyone abandons it — not because the template was wrong, but because manual entry after a long session is the first thing to go. Here is what a good one needs, and what to do instead.
Nearly every trader starts here, and the template is rarely the problem. The problem is that a spreadsheet asks you to do data entry at the end of a session you have already given your full attention to. It works for two weeks. Then one busy day gets skipped, then three, and the file is never opened again.
The second problem is subtler: even a completed spreadsheet mostly stores. Getting it to tell you which setup is profitable means writing formulas across a few hundred rows, and almost nobody does that after a red month.
| Spreadsheet | TradeGreen | |
|---|---|---|
| Effort per trade | Manual entry | None |
| Accuracy | What you remembered | Broker fills |
| Fees and commissions | Usually omitted | Included |
| Multi-leg options | Painful by hand | Grouped automatically |
| Per-setup analysis | Only if you build it | Built in |
| Still updated in month three | Rarely | Always |
That is a perfectly reasonable choice, and a good template has these columns: date and time, symbol, long or short, entry price, exit price, position size, fees, gross and net P&L, your stop, your target, the setup name, and one line on why you took it. The setup name is the column that does the real work — without it you can total your results but never group them.
Add these three calculations, because they are what the totals hide:
Average win divided by average loss. Tells you whether your winners are big enough to pay for your losers — a 70% win rate still loses money if this is below about 0.5.
Gross profit divided by gross loss. Above 1.0 is a book that makes money; computing it per setup is how you find the one that does not.
Win rate times average win, minus loss rate times average loss. The expected result of taking the setup one more time, which is the only forward-looking number on the list.
TradeGreen connects read-only to more than 20 brokerages and builds the same record automatically — exact fills, fees included, options grouped — and computes R-multiple, profit factor and expectancy per setup without a formula. The journal stays current whether or not you remember it, which is the one thing a spreadsheet cannot promise.
It can be, if you actually fill it in. The common failure is not the template but the habit: manual entry at the end of a trading session gets skipped on the first busy day and rarely resumes. A spreadsheet also stores more easily than it analyses — grouping by setup takes formulas most traders never write.
Date and time, symbol, long or short, entry price, exit price, position size, fees, gross and net profit or loss, stop, target, setup name, and a one-line reason. The setup name matters most, because without it you can total your results but never group them by strategy.
R-multiple is average win divided by average absolute loss. Profit factor is gross profit divided by gross loss, where above 1.0 means winners outweigh losers. Expectancy is win rate times average win minus loss rate times average loss. Computing all three per setup, rather than across the whole account, is what reveals which strategy is carrying you.
Most brokers export a CSV you can import, but the export usually needs reshaping every time, does not group multi-leg option positions, and is a manual step that gets skipped. TradeGreen connects read-only to the broker instead, so closed trades arrive without an export step.
There are free spreadsheet templates, and they cost nothing but your time each session. TradeGreen is $10 a month or $84 a year, which is $7 a month — the trade being that the record maintains itself and the per-setup analysis is already computed.
TradeGreen is a journal, not a signal service. It describes trades that already happened in your own account and never predicts markets or recommends what to buy. It connects to your brokerage read-only and cannot place trades.