Most trading journals record what happened. Very few produce the four or five numbers that actually describe whether the method works, and almost none surface the one gap that quietly decides the year: the difference between the reward-to-risk you planned for and the one you actually realised.
Paste a column of results here and you get both, in about the time it takes to copy them. Everything runs in your browser: nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and there is no account to create.
Paste your results
Every trade you have entered, sorted into buckets by result. The shape of this chart is your strategy — a long right tail is a trend system working; a wall on the left is a system whose losers are bigger than its rules allow.
An R-multiple is a trade's result divided by the risk you took on it. Risk $200 and make $500 and the trade was +2.5R. Risk $50 and make $125 and it was also +2.5R — the same quality of trade, executed at a different size.
Recording in R is what makes trades comparable. It removes account growth, position sizing and instrument choice from the picture and leaves only the decision quality, which is the only part you control. It is also the only unit in which expectancy means anything: a system is worth x R per trade, and what that converts to in currency is a separate decision made later, by you, about size.
If your risk per trade was genuinely constant you can paste currency figures and set the risk field above — the tool converts. If your risk varied trade by trade, currency figures will mislead you, and the fix is to start logging R.
Expectancy is the average result of one trade in R. Positive is a business; negative is an expensive hobby, and no amount of size, leverage or conviction changes the sign. It is the single number to protect.
Profit factor is gross profit divided by gross loss. Above 1.0 you are making money; below 1.5 the system is fragile to a change in conditions or a rise in costs. It is more robust than win rate because it weights each trade by how much it actually moved the account.
Average winner against average loser is the diagnostic most journals never compute. It gives you your realised reward-to-risk — which is frequently nothing like the planned one. That gap is the leak, and it is measured against the number you typed in the plan field.
Worst drawdown, in R. This one converts directly into a position size. If your worst historical run cost 12R and you want a repeat to stay inside a 10% account drawdown, you cannot risk more than about 0.8% per trade — and you should assume the next bad run is longer than the last one, because it usually is.
The distribution chart is the part worth staring at. A trend-following system should show a cluster of small losses and a thin right tail carrying all the profit. If your right tail is missing, you are cutting winners. If you have losses well beyond −1R, your stops are not being honoured — and those trades, not the entries, are where the year went.
The most common result: a trader plans for 3R targets, and the analyzer reports a realised reward-to-risk near 1.2R. Nothing is wrong with the entries. What happens is that winners get taken early, at the first moment the profit feels real, while losers are given the full stop distance every time. The asymmetry is invisible trade by trade and decisive over a hundred.
It is not a discipline failure and it is not unusual — it is the disposition effect, the most robustly documented bias in behavioural finance, and it has been measured on ten thousand real brokerage accounts. The fix is structural rather than motivational: define exits before entry, in the market's language rather than in dollars, and let a bracket order execute them while you are calm.
Under thirty, this is a sketch. The order of your trades alone moves drawdown and win rate more than most strategy changes do — we shuffled one identical set of two hundred trades fifty thousand times and got maximum drawdowns ranging from 10.5% to 54.4% with the destination unchanged.
Around a hundred trades the expectancy figure starts to be worth acting on. Below that, treat the shape of the distribution and the realised-versus-planned R gap as the useful output; they stabilise far faster than the headline number.
This tool is only as good as what you paste into it, and the honest reason most traders cannot use it is that the data does not exist. A usable log needs very little: date, instrument, the setup, planned risk in currency, the result in R, and one line on why you exited. That is enough to produce every number on this page and to answer the questions the numbers raise.
We build the Conflux journal for exactly this, and it logs trades against zones and confluence rather than only profit — but a spreadsheet with six columns will do the job. What does not work is memory. Memory keeps the trades that confirm what you already believe.
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