Thought I'd share a basic Excel spreadsheet for tracking trades and trading performance (created on Microsoft Excel 2002). This is intended to serve as a starting point for a Trader's Log and can be modified to suit a trader's needs. My goal was to keep it as simple as possible so that this part of a trader's job does not turn out to be too onerous. Note that there is a lot of room for improvement. For example, this log assumes that trades are opened/closed on the same day and it does not track all expenses, such as the cost of trading platform(s), computing needs, etc. I expect this log to evolve over time.
Trader's Log Worksheets:- Trades - Enter the details for each trade. The data entry for each trade is done in this worksheet.
- Trade Analysis - Calculates the trader;s performance fo all, long, and short trades. No data entry required.
- Account Summary - Summarizes the trader's monthly performance. The initial balance can be entered.
- Monthly P&L - Charts the traders performance from the Account Summary worksheet.
- Performance Summary - Provides additional details on monthly performance.
- Strategy P&L - For traders that trade different strategies, this worksheets tracks the performance of each strategy.
Thought we could use this thread for discussing how traders handle this important part of trading and to get other ideas. Hope this is helpful to some.
P.S. Some of the worksheets have been protected to avoid making changes inadvertently to it. To unprotect the worksheet, click on Tools > Protection > Unprotect Sheet...