Trade Journal – Current Version Features

Feature overview · Version 1.1.0 · Stable · 17 September 2026 · Windows

Keep your trading records, review notes and supporting files together. Trade Journal follows each trade from entry to exit, tracks account balance and recovery debt, and brings daily notes, screenshots and MetaTrader 5 exports into a portable journal.

Trade Recording and Review

• Create trades with a trading pair, Long or Short direction and an automatically assigned sequential trade number.
• Record a Buy-In, any number of While entries and an Exit, each with its own date, time and description.
• Keep open positions and closed trades in separate views.
• Review expandable trade cards in History with entry details, date ranges, account balances and colour-coded profit or loss.
• Keep History trades expanded while adding entry attachments or saving edits. Collapsed cards also retain their state during list updates.
• Edit or delete individual entries and remove entire trades after confirmation. Account balance and recovery debt are recalculated from the remaining records.
• Create reusable description templates for Buy-In, While and Exit entries and select them when recording a trade entry.

Account Balance and Profit or Loss

• Set the starting balance and account currency when creating a journal.
• Record the account balance at exit to calculate profit or loss from the previous calculated balance.
• Record deposits and withdrawals as separate transactions in History. They adjust the account balance without counting as trading profit or loss.
• Delete balance transactions after confirmation and recalculate the journal's balances.
• View the current account balance and the balances and results of closed trades directly in the journal.

Full and Partial Recovery

• Track accumulated losses as recovery debt and view the outstanding amount alongside the account balance.
• “Recover Drawdown” is selected by default for new manual and MT5 exits when recovery tracking is enabled. Editing an existing exit preserves its saved selection.
• Reset recovery debt when the trade's profit covers the outstanding amount.
• When positive profit is insufficient, choose “Partial Recovery” to subtract that profit and carry the remaining debt forward, or “Save Anyway” to reset the entire debt to zero.
• Review the profit, outstanding debt and expected remaining debt before confirming a partial recovery. Cancel returns to the exit form with the entered values intact.
• Reduce debt across several profitable trades. With recovery selected, losing exits add their losses to the debt and break-even exits leave it unchanged, without a reset dialog. Recovery debt never falls below zero.
• Recalculate new automatic recoveries from actual profit after retroactive edits. If a previously profitable exit becomes a loss, it increases debt instead of clearing it.
• Use the same recovery choices for manually recorded exits and MT5 imports.
• Retain recovery choices when saving and reopening a journal. Editing a partial recovery displays its saved choice; changes to earlier entries recalculate subsequent recovery amounts.
• Enable or disable recovery tracking for each journal. Existing recovery choices are preserved while tracking is disabled.
• Use “Reset Debt” in Settings to clear recovery debt while preserving trades, account balance and profit or loss. Existing exits are excluded from future recovery calculations.

Calendar and Daily Notes

• Browse a monthly calendar with weeks starting on Monday, previous and next month navigation, and a button to return to today.
• See today's date highlighted and daily note previews directly in the calendar.
• Add notes and attachments to a day independently of individual trades.
• Write daily notes in a dedicated editor with standard text, three heading levels, bold and italic formatting.
• View the selected day's attachments and trades with an entry on that date, including attachments from those trades and their entries.
• Drag attachments into note text to insert references and open them with Ctrl+click. References travel with the journal.
• Save note edits or cancel to keep the previous note unchanged.

Attachments and Screenshots

• Attach files to an entire trade, an individual Buy-In, While or Exit entry, or a calendar day.
• View the current entry's attachments, file names and sizes directly on the right of Buy-In, While and Exit forms. Add files with “Add Attachment” or drag them onto the panel.
• Use “Paste Clipboard” in entry forms to add copied images as PNG attachments. Save commits pending attachments; Cancel or closing the form preserves the entry's original attachments.
• Add files with the file picker or drag them onto trade cards, entry rows, calendar days and sections of the attachment window.
• Paste screenshots from the clipboard into the attachment window.
• Preview images as thumbnails and open them in an enlarged viewer.
• Open other attached files in the system's default application.
• Browse attachments grouped by entire trade, Buy-In, chronological While entries and Exit, or open only the attachments for a particular entry or day.
• Remove attachments after confirmation while preserving the original source files.

Changes made to an attachment in an external application are not automatically imported back into the journal.

Portable Journals and Saving

• Create separate journals, open existing journals and quickly reopen the most recently used journal.
• Keep trades, deposits and withdrawals, daily notes, settings and attachments together in one portable .njrnl file.
• Transfer or back up a journal by copying its single file after a successful save.
• Enable autosave with an interval from 1 to 60 minutes; the default is every 5 minutes.
• Use “Save Now” for an immediate save or “Save As” to switch to a new file name.
• Check the journal path, last successful save and pending changes in File settings.
• Save pending changes when closing or switching journals, even with autosave disabled.

Recovery and File Protection

• Automatically recover locally saved changes after a crash when reopening the same journal, including changes not yet written to its portable file.
• Preserve the last successfully saved journal and its working copy if saving fails. Retry saving or choose a new location before closing.
• Detect external changes to an open journal and prevent overwriting them. Use “Save As” to keep both versions.
• Prevent another application instance from opening the same journal path while its working session is in use.
• Open older JSON journals and create a backup of the original JSON file before the first save in the portable package format.
• Preserve the full-reset behaviour of recovery markers from older journals.

Older application versions that only support JSON journals cannot open the portable .njrnl package format.

MetaTrader 5 Connector

• Use the Neuranel MT5 Exporter to import fully closed MT5 positions as exits into existing open journal trades.
• Capture closed positions, including manual closes and stop-loss or take-profit exits. The exporter monitors the account without sending orders.
• Catch up on closed positions after restarting MT5 within a configurable lookback period, which defaults to 30 days.
• Import an export file manually or enable “Auto import” to check the configured export folder every three seconds.
• Match open trades by symbol, Long/Short direction and entry time.
• Configure the export folder, broker symbol mappings, matching tolerance and broker timestamp correction separately for each journal.
• Review every proposed exit, adjust its timestamp and account balance, choose recovery options and explicitly confirm with “Close trade”.
• Identify catch-up exports that use the balance at export time so the balance can be checked before saving.
• Postpone or ignore exports. For missing or ambiguous matches, use the information dropdown to select an open trade manually.
• Dismiss notifications without deleting the original export files.
• Prevent duplicate imports within the same journal and preserve the original export as an exit attachment.
• Keep connector settings and imported or ignored export identifiers with the portable journal.

The connector requires the exporter to be installed and running in MT5. Positions are offered only once fully closed; netting position reversals are skipped. Profit or loss is calculated from the journal's account balances. Review the imported balance, which may include other account activity.

Journal Preferences

• Customise the prefix and minimum number of digits for trade numbers with a live preview.
• Search trading pairs, choose which pairs appear when creating a trade and mark favourites.
• Manage account currency, recovery settings, description templates, file settings and MT5 preferences for each journal.

Installation and Updates

• Install Trade Journal with the Windows installer.
• Automatically check for newer application versions at startup.
• Download an update after confirmation and follow its download progress.
• Verify downloaded installers against the provided SHA-256 checksum.
• Confirm installation separately and save the open journal before the installer starts.