They’re lost to one oversized trade after two losses, on a Friday, forty minutes before the session ends. A journal that only stores entries and exits will record that faithfully and tell you nothing. These are the seven criteria that separate a journal which changes the next evaluation from one that just archives the last one.
Use this against whatever you’re evaluating, including this one. The right-hand column is our own honest answer, and two of the rows go against us.
| What to check | Why it mattersduring an evaluation | TradingSocialhonestly |
|---|---|---|
| The account | ||
| Separate challenge, live and demo accounts | A challenge and a live account are different experiments with different rules. Averaging them gives a number describing neither. | 4 account types |
| Risk measured in R, not dollars | Account sizes change between evaluations. R is the only unit that survives a reset and lets you compare this challenge to the last. | |
| The discipline | ||
| Rules you set, scored against your trades | The breach that ends a challenge is almost never a surprise. It is a rule you already knew, broken under pressure. A journal should price that. | 6 rules, Trader plan |
| Mistakes tagged across trades, not per trade | One tagged mistake is a note. The same tag ninety times is a diagnosis. | Trader plan |
| The friction | ||
| Trades captured without typing | The single biggest cause of an abandoned journal. Manual entry is paid for at the exact moment you least want to pay it — after a loss. | MT5 only, hourly, Pro |
| Works if your firm isn’t on MT5 | Plenty of firms run cTrader, DXtrade, Match-Trader or their own platform. Check before you buy anything. | Manual or statement only |
| The record | ||
| A record you can show someone | Funded traders get asked for a track record — by the next firm, by an audience, by an investor. A spreadsheet screenshot is not one. | |
| Honest about what it cannot see | No journal connects to a prop firm’s dashboard or knows your evaluation status. Anything implying otherwise is worth distrusting on principle. | Stated plainly, below |
Capabilities and plan gates as at 1 September 2026. See pricing for the full breakdown.
Worth saying on a page like this, because pages like this usually don’t.
Not “the best journal” — that depends on which of the seven rows above binds hardest for you. One thing here is genuinely unusual in the category.
Seven things: keep challenge accounts separate from live and demo, measure risk in R rather than dollars, record the rules you set and score you against them, capture trades without manual typing, survive a losing day without being abandoned, keep a record you can show someone, and stay honest about what it can’t see.
No, and be sceptical of anything claiming it does. There’s no reading, detecting or enforcing of a firm’s rule set and no access to your evaluation status. It’s your own journal: you set your own rules and your logged trades are scored against those.
A challenge account and a live account are different experiments with different risk rules. Averaging them produces a number that describes neither. Every account here carries a label — prop, live, demo or competition — so challenge stats never contaminate a live track record.
No journal can, because none of them sit between you and the order. What one can do is make the cost of breaking your own rules visible afterwards, so the pattern is legible before the next evaluation rather than after it.
Only if the firm runs MetaTrader 5 — many do, not all. Sync is hourly on the Pro plan. Accounts on any other platform are logged manually or imported from a statement, and every trade is labelled by how it arrived.
Yes, and it’s usable rather than a demo — manual logging with your most recent 30 trades. Every signup also gets 14 days of Pro with no card required.
Fourteen days of Pro, no card. If two of the seven rows above go the other way for you, one of the links on this page is the better answer and we’d rather you took it.
