Full disclosure at the top: I run MyTradeDiary, the product in this post. This is the story of why it exists and what I learned building it.
The problem nobody logs
Every trader I know has a version of the same story: a trade they swore they'd never take again… taken again, a few weeks later. Not from ignorance — from amnesia. The first trade was never written down anywhere their future self would actually look.
The traders who do journal usually land in a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are great at arithmetic and terrible at insight. They'll happily tell you your net P&L while never once mentioning that "chased an entry" appears in your notes fourteen times.
What I built instead
MyTradeDiary is a trade journal that treats the lesson as a first-class field:
- The trade: symbol, side, entry, exit, size, stop, target, fees — stocks, crypto, options, futures, forex.
- The math, automatic: P&L, % return, R-multiple, win rate, equity curve, and a breakdown by setup, so "which of my setups actually makes money?" is a screen, not a research project.
- The behavior: every trade gets a "followed my plan?" flag (which rolls up into a discipline score) and optional mistake tags. The dashboard literally has a card called Most repeated mistakes.
- The review habit: a P&L calendar heatmap and a weekly review recap assembled from your own trades, because reviewing is the part everyone skips.
- Low friction: TradingView CSV import, chart screenshots attached to trades, and voice memos, because a journal you don't open after a long session is a diary you'll abandon by March.
Two build decisions worth stealing
Local-first, account-optional. The journal works with no account at all — trades live in the browser's local storage. Accounts (Supabase auth) only add cloud sync, and paid status is granted by matching the buyer's email at first sign-in, so someone can pay before they ever create an account and still land as premium. That removed an entire class of "I paid but it says free" support pain before it existed.
Merchant of record from day one. Payments run through Paddle: they handle tax/VAT and are the seller of record, the webhook flips an entitlement, and I never touch card data or sales-tax filings. The fee math (5% + 50¢) is boring, and boring is what you want from payments.
The honest part
The journal is free — that's deliberate; a journal behind a paywall is a journal nobody starts. Premium is for the layer on top (first up: a read-only snapshot a trader can share with a mentor, live only while they say so). There's a $39 one-time founding price for the first 25 supporters while the product operates, then $15/month.
Marketing, until this post, was zero. Which is the next thing I'm learning in public.
If you journal your trades: what does your current setup fail to tell you? That's the question shaping the roadmap.
Try it (free, in the browser): https://mytradediary.trade/
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