Choosing a trading journal: spreadsheet, broker-connected, or crypto-native

Spreadsheets cost nothing, bend to any workflow, and teach you your own metrics by making you build them. Their weakness is entry friction: every fill typed by hand, every formula maintained by hand. They suit low-frequency traders with a single venue and strong habits - and they are where most journaling attempts quietly end.

Broker-connected journal apps - the established commercial products in this category - import trades from stock, options and futures brokers, and layer analytics, charting and often coaching features on top. Most run on subscriptions. If you trade equities or futures through a mainstream broker, this family is built for you; their crypto coverage varies widely by product and is worth verifying against your specific venues before paying.

Crypto-native journals start from the venues crypto traders actually use - exchange API keys, perpetuals venues, and wallet addresses on public chains - and treat funding, gas, and on-chain position reconstruction as core problems rather than afterthoughts. Their trade-off runs the other way: little or no coverage of traditional brokerage accounts.

• Can it import from every venue you trade? A journal covering half your activity reviews half your behaviour. List your venues first, then check each candidate against the list - not the other way round.
• How do credentials work? Prefer read-only API keys, and prefer tools that never ask for withdrawal or trading permissions. For on-chain activity, an address-only import needs no credentials at all.
• Does it treat writing as first-class? If the product is analytics with a notes field, the reasoning half of the journal - thesis, mistakes, lessons - will atrophy. Look for structured prompts, not a blank box.
• What happens to figures it cannot know? Tokens received by transfer, unpriceable fills: does the tool estimate silently, or mark the figure unavailable? Silent estimates corrupt every statistic downstream.
• Who sees your data? Whether entries are private by default, what sharing is opt-in versus automatic, and what deletion actually deletes.
• Price against habit. A paid tool you use beats a free one you abandon - and the reverse. The subscription is rarely the real cost; the habit is.

EntryEx.it is in the crypto-native family, with a foot in futures: it imports from public wallet addresses on eight chains, from eleven exchanges by read-only API key or address, and from Tradovate futures accounts. It groups fills into positions, computes P&L net of fees and funding, and marks unknowable figures as unavailable rather than estimating. Around the numbers it puts a structured writing surface - pre-trade thesis, confidence, mistakes, lessons, a process score - with every entry private by default and shareable per-entry, down to the field. It is free, with no advertising and no sale of data. The full list of supported venues is on the integrations page.

Venues without an automatic import are not shut out: any trade can be recorded as a manual entry with the same thesis, review and grading surface, including paper and backtest modes that stay out of your real P&L. Manual entries carry the honest label they deserve - they never count toward leaderboards - so the record stays trustworthy while covering everything you trade.