Some of the best traders we know take about 3 - 8 trades a day. If this is about where you’re at (or you plan to use Insight primarily for swing trading), then manual entry won’t take you much time at all with our intuitive user interface. However, we also offer trade importing from PropReports®, Lightspeed®, Interactive Brokers®, TD Ameritrade®, E*TRADE®, and TradeStation®, and our trade importing couldn’t be easier. If you would like your firm to be added to our list, please contact us support@insighttradingjournal.com.

Insight Trading Journal™ was designed with the complete trader in mind, a trader who day trades for income and swing trades for wealth. Reports that are not typically used to analyze swing trading results (e.g. Time of Day and Day of Week reports) can be filtered to exclude trades with a timeframe of 'Daily' assigned to them. This way your swing trading results won’t impact your ability to analyze your day trading. Since our filters apply to all reports across the board, this is an easy way to analyze only your swing trading results. You can also filter by individual swing trading strategies.

Traders who constantly jump from one failing strategy to the next are the most likely to give up and fail. We understand this and have incorporated 'no strategy' reporting directly into Insight Trading Journal™. If you take a trade without a pre-planned strategy, simply tag it as 'no strategy'. The results will speak for themselves, since you can filter any of our reports to see the results of all 'no strategy' trades. You might be surprised what this is costing you. Once you see the results for yourself, you will begin to develop the self-discipline to stick to your pre-planned trading strategies.

Our Strategy Tester is an easy way to essentially perform a Maximum Favorable Excursion (MFE) analysis. Simply select the strategy you want to test, and the Strategy Tester will tell you if you are exiting too soon and where your trades are getting to on average in terms of risk unit target level.

The Strategy Tester has a chart on the left hand side which tells you what fraction of your trades is getting to various target levels. It also has a chart on the right side which shows your actual results as a horizontal black line and your potential results (at various target levels) as a white area chart. A summary of the best all-or-nothing (AON) management approach can be found below the charts. Once you have this information you can either switch your trade management to an AON approach or use the information to modify your management to a method that better suits you. For example, you may exit some shares early but hold some portion until you reach the target level most often attained for each strategy.

No other trading journal offers such an easy way to evaluate your trade management.

While the Strategy Tester is specific to each of your trading strategies, the percent captured report can show you similar information but can be filtered for any criteria you wish (e.g. all trades taken in a given date range and taken off the 5-minute chart). You can even filter by any custom tags you have created. With the Percent Captured reporting tool, you will know if you are consistently leaving too much money on the table and if your trade management can improve. While it is unreasonable to capture much more than about 75% of your trades’ moves on average, you’ll know you have some work to do if you are routinely capturing less than ~50% of your trades’ maximum moves. This information is important to understand if you want to maximize your profit on winning trades.

Insight Trading Journal™ plots equity and risk unit curves in our summary overview section, but we also have our very own Curve Generator which plots equity and risk unit curves alongside your potential profit curves at various percent captured levels. This will give you a good idea of how well you are managing your trades and how well you are trading over time, since the Curve Generator includes trades that were losers too. For example, if you plot 200 trades in the Curve Generator and see that over time you are capturing more of your trades’ maximum moves, then you know you are improving, and vice versa. The key take away for any trader using the Curve Generator is knowing for sure if they are improving over time or getting worse.