Most trading journal templates were designed for someone trading equities during a six-and-a-half hour session. Crypto breaks several of the assumptions baked into them: the market never closes, positions carry funding, and your exchange hands you a fill history far more complete than anything a stock broker offered in 2010. Copying that template across means spending your evenings retyping data you already own.

Here is the split that matters. Some of a journal your exchange writes for you, perfectly and for free. The rest only exists in your head, and it disappears within about a day.

What Bybit and Binance already store

Pull your trade history and you have the entire quantitative side of a journal sitting there:

That covers the majority of columns in a standard journal template. Retyping any of it into a spreadsheet adds nothing except transcription errors and a reason to quit by week three. Trady reads this history directly from Bybit, with Binance support currently in beta and still being verified against live accounts.

Treat this data as the substrate. Your job is not to reproduce it.

One caveat worth knowing: exchange exports describe fills, not positions. A single position built from three entries and closed in two exits appears as five rows. If you’re analysing by hand, decide early whether you’re studying fills or positions, because the two produce different trade counts and different average results from identical activity.

The four things your exchange cannot see

The exchange records what you did. It has no access to why, and that gap is where a journal earns its keep.

What you decided before you clicked. The setup you believed you saw, the invalidation level you picked, the size you intended to take. Written before entry, this is the only honest record of your plan. Written after the outcome is known, it becomes a story about why you were right.

Which trades were planned and which were reactions. Two longs on ETH at the same price look identical in a fill history. One came off a level you’d marked that morning. The other came ninety seconds after a stop-out, while you were still annoyed. The exchange cannot tell them apart. You can, if you note it at the time.

Your state, in one word. Not a paragraph. Tired, rushed, calm, tilted, distracted. One word per session is enough to correlate against results later, and it takes four seconds.

External context worth remembering. A funding spike, a CPI print, an exchange outage, a chain halt. Three months from now this is the detail that explains an otherwise inexplicable cluster of losses.

That’s the whole list. Four items, none of which the exchange can fill in, all of which decay within about 24 hours of the trade.

Two crypto-specific fields worth adding

Standard journal templates skip these because equities don’t have them, and they cost real money in perps.

Funding. On a leveraged position held through several funding windows, the funding component stops being a rounding error. A position carried for 30 hours across four windows at 0.01% each, at $8,000 notional, gives up around $3.20 before the price does anything at all. That’s small on one trade. Across 60 held positions in a quarter it changes which strategies look profitable. Log whether a trade was intended as an intraday move or a multi-day hold, because the funding cost only makes sense against that intent.

Distance to liquidation at entry. Leverage is already in your fill data, but the number that actually describes your risk is how far price could travel against you before the position closed itself. Traders who size by leverage rather than by invalidation distance tend to discover this after it matters. Noting it at entry makes the pattern visible in weeks instead of quarters.

Write it at entry or don’t bother

Timing decides whether any of this is worth doing. A note written before you click records a decision. The same note written after the position closes records an explanation, and explanations are shaped by the outcome you already know.

This is not a character flaw. Memory reconstructs rather than replays, and it reconstructs toward coherence. A trade that worked gets remembered as better planned than it was. A trade that failed gets remembered as unlucky. Both edits happen without any sense of dishonesty, which is what makes them hard to catch.

The practical version is a two-line note before entry: the level that invalidates the idea, and one word for why you’re taking it now rather than an hour ago. Ten seconds. If you can’t produce the second line, that itself is information, and it’s the most useful thing a journal will ever tell you in real time.

Anything you plan to write after the fact should be limited to things the outcome cannot distort - what the funding rate did, whether the exchange lagged, what news landed. Save the reasoning for entry, when it’s still a prediction.

Keep the number of fields brutally small

The most common failure of a hand-kept journal is ambition. Fourteen columns get designed in an afternoon, filled diligently for a week, and abandoned by the end of the month.

Four fields is a sustainable journal. Planned or reactive, one word for state, the invalidation level, and a note only when something unusual happened. That’s under fifteen seconds per trade, which survives contact with a bad session in a way that a full template does not.

You can always add a field later once the habit holds. Almost nobody successfully removes one, because cutting a column feels like giving up, so the oversized template stays until the whole thing collapses.

The 24/7 problem nobody’s template solves

Equity journals assume a trading day with a start and an end. Crypto gives you neither, and it quietly distorts every daily metric you calculate.

If you group your trades by UTC date, a session that runs from 9pm to 1am splits into two “days,” each showing half the activity and neither showing the actual run. Your trades-per-day figure looks reasonable. Your worst session becomes invisible because it was cut in half at midnight.

The fix is to define your own session boundary and stay consistent. Pick the hour you normally stop - for a lot of people trading after work, something like 2am local - and treat that as the day boundary rather than midnight UTC. Then count trades per session, not per calendar day. Overtrading shows up honestly, and so does the length of a bad run.

Try this tonight

Open Trady and go to the Review tab. Take your last ten trades and add one line to each: planned or reactive. Nothing else. It should take under three minutes, because the prices, sizes and timestamps are already there.

Then open Insight and see where the reactive ones sit - how close they came after a loss, and what they did to your average result. That single field, logged consistently, tends to be worth more than every column you were copying by hand.

Trading carries risk. This article is about analytics and record-keeping, not financial advice.