Trading Journal Template for Indian Markets

What Should a Trading Journal Template Include?

Most trading journal templates online are bare-bones - date, buy/sell, P&L. That's a trade log, not a journal. A real journal template should capture the context behind every trade so you can learn from it later.

We recommend tracking in every trade:

Essential Fields (Track These Minimum)

Advanced Fields (Add These After 1 Month)

• Market condition: trending, ranging, volatile, news-driven
• Confidence level (1-5) at entry - calibrate your conviction vs actual results
• Stop loss price and whether you moved it (most traders do, and it costs them)
• Risk-reward ratio at entry vs actual R:R achieved
• Screenshots/chart annotations showing your entry and exit points
• Post-trade reflection written at end of day, not in the heat of the moment

Free trading journal Excel download (India)

If you would rather not build the sheet yourself, download the free trading journal Excel file (.xlsx). It has every field from the table above, the formulas from the sections below already filled in, and 500 empty rows ready for your trades. It opens in Microsoft Excel and in Google Sheets. There is no sign-up and nothing to install.

What is inside the file

• How to use: short steps, a made-up Nifty option example and tips for F&O trades.
• Trade Log: one row per trade with Date, Segment (Equity, F&O or Commodity), Instrument, Expiry, Strike, CE/PE/FUT, Buy/Sell, Lots, Lot size, Entry, Exit, Stop loss, Target, Charges, Setup, Emotion, Mistake, Followed plan (Y/N) and Notes. The header row stays in place when you scroll, and most columns have dropdowns.
• Monthly Summary: trades, wins, losses, win rate, net P&L, average win, average loss, profit factor, how often you followed your plan and the charges you paid, month by month. It also splits your results by segment, by setup and by whether you followed your plan.
• Charges reference: current Indian charge rates (STT, exchange charges, SEBI fee, stamp duty, GST) with the circular for each and the date we checked them, 13 Oct 2026.
• Lists: the choices for the Setup, Emotion and Mistake dropdowns. Change them to match your own setups.

How to use it for Nifty and Bank Nifty F&O

1. Pick F&O in Segment and type the underlying, such as NIFTY or BANKNIFTY, in Instrument.
2. Type the Expiry date and the Strike, then pick CE, PE or FUT. Two trades in the same strike with different expiries are different contracts, so keep the expiry on every row.
3. Pick Buy if you opened by buying, or Sell if you opened by selling (a short future or an option you wrote). The sheet uses this to give the P&L the right sign.
4. Type Lots and Lot size from your order or contract note. The sheet does not fill in the lot size for you, because exchanges revise lot sizes.
5. Type the total charges from your contract note. To estimate them before the note arrives, use the total trading cost calculator.
6. For a spread or a straddle, use one row per leg and write the strategy name, such as Short straddle, in Setup so the legs group together in the summary.

Example with made-up numbers: you buy 1 lot of a Nifty 25000 CE at 100, sell it at 130, had a stop loss at 80, and your contract note shows ₹67 in charges. If your order showed a lot size of 65, the sheet shows Quantity 65, Gross P&L ₹1,950, Net P&L ₹1,883, Risk ₹1,300 and an R-multiple of 1.45. A short trade works the other way: sell a Bank Nifty future at 52,000 and buy it back at 52,100, and Gross P&L is (52,000 - 52,100) x quantity, a loss.

Column-by-column guide to your trading journal sheet

Here is a layout for one tab, with a made-up example row so you can see what to type. The example is a Nifty option trade. The numbers are examples, not real quotes or advice.

Keep Date, Instrument, Quantity, Entry price and Exit price as plain numbers or text, never merged cells. Formulas break on merged cells. Add one column at a time, and only when you will really fill it in.

Formulas for Indian trading charges

Put every rate in its own cell on a separate Rates tab, and make your formulas point to those cells. Rates change. When they do, you edit one cell instead of every formula. The structure for each charge is the same: a rate multiplied by a value.

For the example row, sell value is 130 x 65 = 8,450 and buy value is 100 x 65 = 6,500. STT is about ₹13, the exchange charge about ₹5 and GST about ₹8. With an assumed flat brokerage of ₹40 for the round trip, charges come to about ₹67. The SEBI fee and stamp duty each round to well under ₹1 here. So net P&L is 1,950 minus 67, about ₹1,883. To cross-check your formulas, run the same trade through the F&O trading cost calculator or the STT calculator. For how each charge appears on a contract note, see brokerage and charges explained.

Keep these costs separate from income tax. Your sheet shows trading costs only. Tax on the profit depends on your total income, so check with a CA.

Performance formulas: win rate, average win, profit factor and expectancy

Assume your Net P&L values are in column J, rows 2 to 500. These formulas work the same in Excel and Google Sheets.

A win rate means little on its own. A 40% win rate can still be profitable when winners are much larger than losers, and a 70% win rate can lose money when one loser wipes out several winners. That is why you read win rate together with average win, average loss and profit factor. For more, see win rate, expectancy and how to calculate trading expectancy. These numbers need a decent number of trades. With only a handful of trades, they are mostly noise.

Weekly and monthly review dashboard

Add a second tab called Review and build it with a pivot table or SUMIFS formulas. Four summaries are enough to start.

• Net P&L by week and by month, so you can see the pattern over time.
• Net P&L by strategy, to find which setups pay and which only look good in memory.
• Net P&L by emotion at entry, to see what anxious or revenge trades really cost you.
• Net P&L by 'followed plan' Yes or No, which is often the clearest view of discipline.

Review weekly for 15 minutes: read your lesson column and pick one thing to change. Do a longer monthly review, looking at the summaries above. See how to review your trades for a method. Write the change down, then check next month whether it happened.

Tracking F&O, equity and intraday on separate tabs

Use one tab per type of trade: F&O, equity delivery, intraday and commodity. The charges differ, and so does the tax treatment, so mixing them in one tab makes both harder. Keep the same core columns on every tab so your Review tab can add them together. For F&O, always type the quantity you really traded. Do not fill it by copying a lot size from an old list, because exchanges revise lot sizes.

Getting trades from your broker's report into the sheet

Most brokers give you a trade report or contract note in their back office. You can copy the rows from that file into a Raw tab of your own sheet, then use lookup formulas to pull the date, price and quantity into your journal tab. Column names differ between brokers, so match them by hand the first time. The report has none of your reasons, emotions or plan, so you still add those columns yourself. That part is what makes it a journal and not a trade log.

Google Sheets version and using it on your phone

Everything above works in Google Sheets. Build the tabs once, then use File, then Make a copy, before entering real trades, so you always keep a blank master. For dropdowns, use Data, then Data validation. On a phone, the Google Sheets app handles typing a row, but wide tables are awkward. Many traders keep only five or six columns on the phone view and fill in the rest later on a laptop. If you prefer paper, there is a printable journal layout.

Build a Free Excel Template for Indian Traders

You can build a spreadsheet with all the fields above in Excel or Google Sheets, or start from the free download near the top of this page. A good layout has:

• Separate sheets for Equity, F&O, Intraday, and Swing trades
• Formula-calculated P&L, win rate and average win/loss (formulas are shown below)
• An emotion dropdown you set up with data validation
• Strategy dropdown customizable to your setups
• Monthly summary sheet with basic analytics
• Works in both Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets

Template vs Online Journal - Which Is Right for You?

How to Transition from Template to Online Journal

1. Use the Excel template for 1-3 months to build the journaling habit
2. Keep your spreadsheet as your own record of older trades (you can save a copy as CSV)
3. OneTradeJournal has no import or upload, so start logging new trades there by hand
4. Reports, behaviour flags and the AI tools work on the trades you log in OneTradeJournal; older rows stay in your sheet
5. Nothing is deleted from your spreadsheet, and nothing transfers automatically

Trading journal Excel, XLS and spreadsheet formats

The free download is an .xlsx file, the format Excel has used since Excel 2007. People also search for a trading journal in xls, the older Excel 97-2003 format. If you need that format, open the .xlsx in Excel and use File, Save As, then choose Excel 97-2003 Workbook. After saving, open the Monthly Summary tab and check that the numbers still add up. The .xlsx file also opens in Google Sheets, LibreOffice Calc and most phone spreadsheet apps.

Trading journal format: one row per trade

Whatever spreadsheet you use, the format that works is simple. Use one row for each trade and one column for each detail. Type dates as real dates, not text, so the monthly totals can find them. Keep prices and quantities as plain numbers. Do not merge cells. Keep summaries on a separate tab that reads from the trade rows, so you never type a total by hand. The free file follows this format, so you can add your own columns at the right-hand end without breaking the formulas.

Using it as a Google Sheets trading journal

1. Download the .xlsx file to your computer.
2. In Google Sheets, open File, then Import, then Upload, and pick the file. You can also upload it to Google Drive and open it with Google Sheets.
3. The dropdowns, the formulas and the Monthly Summary keep working in Sheets.
4. Before typing real trades, use File, then Make a copy, so you always keep a blank master.

What makes this free trading journal Excel India-specific

• Money columns are in rupees (₹).
• F&O columns for expiry, strike and CE, PE or FUT, so each row names one exact contract.
• Segments for Equity, F&O and Commodity, so you can see which one makes or loses money.
• A charges tab with the STT rates in force since 1 April 2026: 0.15% on options sold and 0.05% on futures sold, from NSE circular NSE/FATAX/73524. See the trading charges log for every change.
• Lot size is a column you type, never a lookup table, because lot sizes change.