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Free trading journal

A record of what happened is only half a journal. The point of keeping one is to find out why — and then what that reason has cost you in money. TapeSheet is free, needs no account, and works from the MT4 or MT5 statement you already have.

A journal is for reviewing decisions, not recording outcomes

A spreadsheet of results tells you that March was bad. It does not tell you that March was bad because you moved your stop on eleven trades, and that those eleven trades cost you more than your best week made. That second sentence is the reason to journal, and a record of outcomes alone can never produce it.

The mechanism is unglamorous: tag what you were doing, tag what you did wrong, and let the arithmetic be brutal about the pattern.

What you tag, and what it gives back

• Setup tags — breakout, pullback, range fade, news, trend continuation, or your own. Answers “which of my setups actually pays?”
• Mistake tags — moved stop, oversized, FOMO entry, revenge trade, no plan, cut winner early. Answers the more useful question.
• Rating and notes — how well you executed, separate from whether it won. A good trade can lose.
• Planned risk → R-multiples — enter what you intended to risk and every result becomes comparable across position sizes and instruments.
• Daily notes with mood and discipline — the two things a statement can never record, and the two that explain most bad weeks.

The chart that changes behaviour

Performance by mistake tag, in money. Not a count, not a percentage — the actual figure each habit has cost you over the period. A statement cannot produce this at any price, because a statement has no idea why you took the trade; it records, it does not review.

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The real product on the bundled demo account. Open it yourself →

Free, with no account and no limit

Every part of TapeSheet is free: no account, no trial clock, no trade limit, and no feature held back for a paid tier. There is nothing to sign up for because there is nothing on our side to sign up to — your statement is parsed in the browser and your journal is stored in your own browser’s storage, so your trading history never leaves your device.

Ads on content pages like this one are how the site pays for itself, and the analyzer itself carries none. That is the whole business model, written up on how this site makes money.

The tradeoff, before you rely on it

We would rather say that here than have you discover it in month eight. The app asks the browser to mark its storage persistent on your first entry and reports what the browser actually answered rather than implying a guarantee. Safari and iOS get an extra warning, because WebKit clears unused site data after about a week.

Getting started takes about a minute

1. Export your history. MT4 or MT5 — right-click the history, choose All History, save the report.
2. Drop it on the analyzer. Metrics, equity curve and breakdowns appear in about a second. Nothing uploads.
3. Open a trade and write the entry. Rating, setup, mistakes, planned risk, notes. Thirty seconds a trade, and only for the ones worth reviewing.
4. Read the payoff tables next month. Performance by setup, and what each mistake cost. Export a backup while you are there.

Questions

What does “free” actually mean here?

Every feature is free with no account, no trial clock, no trade limit and nothing held back for a paid tier. The analyzer has no ads either. Content pages like this one will carry ads eventually — that is the whole business model, and it is written up on the ethics page.

How can there be no signup?

Because there is no server holding anything. Your statement is parsed in the browser and your journal is stored in your own browser’s IndexedDB. With no data on our side there is nothing an account would be protecting, so we do not ask for one.

What happens to my journal if I clear my browser?

It is gone, and nobody can restore it — including us, because we never had a copy. That is the honest cost of no-signup. Settings → Export writes the whole journal to one JSON file; the app asks the browser to mark its storage persistent, tells you what the browser answered, and reminds you to back up.

Does it work with my broker?

If your broker gives you MT4 or MT5, almost certainly. Broker-customised templates, translated headers, comma decimals and non-UTF-8 encodings are all handled, and every instrument the broker lists works — metals, indices and crypto CFDs included. If a file fails, the analyzer says which step broke and asks you to tell us which broker it is, so that broker parses next time.

Also worth reading

• MT4 statement analyzer — what the analysis side reads and computes.
• MT5 report analyzer — deals, positions, hedging and netting.
• Which numbers are approximations — stated plainly, including which way they are wrong.