Trade Entry

Trade entry panel

Add trades manually when you do not use the Journal EA or need to log trades from non-MT5 brokers.

Why Manual Entry?

Auto-journal handles the heavy lifting if you trade on MT5, but there are several situations where you need to add trades by hand:

  • You trade on another platform. If your broker uses cTrader, TradingView, or a proprietary web platform, auto-journal is not available. Manual entry lets you journal those trades with the same structure and analytics.
  • You want to backfill historical trades. Maybe you just started using MyTradr but you have three months of trades in a spreadsheet that you want to bring in. Manual entry lets you add them one by one with full details.
  • You are paper trading. If you are testing a new strategy on a demo account or even on paper, you can log those trades to track your hypothetical performance before going live.
  • You want to add psychology data to auto-journaled trades. Auto-journal captures the numbers — prices, volume, P&L — but it cannot capture what was going on in your head. You can open any auto-journaled trade and add emotion tags, mistake tags, setup labels, and notes after the fact.

Real-Life Scenarios

Logging trades from cTrader. You trade EURUSD on a cTrader broker. After each trade closes, you open the trade entry form, fill in the instrument, direction, prices, and lot size — it takes about 30 seconds. The result, P&L, and risk-reward are calculated automatically. Over time, your cTrader trades sit alongside everything else in your journal with full analytics, heatmaps, and sorting.

Backfilling three months of history. You have been tracking your XAUUSD and NAS100 trades in a Google Sheet for the past quarter. You want all that data in MyTradr so you can use the calendar heatmap and analytics. You work through the sheet, entering each trade with its original dates. It takes an hour for 60 trades, but once it is done, you have a complete picture — including the ability to spot patterns in those old trades that you never noticed in the spreadsheet.

Annotating auto-journaled trades with psychology data. Your Journal EA brought in 8 trades from today. The numbers are all there, but you want to capture the mental side. You click into each trade and add: “FOMO” on the GBPUSD trade you took because you saw someone post about it on Twitter, “Confident” on the EURUSD trade where you followed your plan perfectly, and “Moved SL” as a mistake on the NAS100 trade where you widened your stop to avoid getting stopped out (and then got stopped out anyway for a bigger loss). Next week, the psychology analytics will show you the correlation between these tags and your results.

How to Add a Trade

Here is a step-by-step walkthrough:

  1. Open the trade entry form. In the journal view, click the “Add Trade” button.
  2. Select the instrument. Choose from your configured instrument list (e.g., EURUSD, XAUUSD, NAS100).
  3. Set the direction. Buy or Sell.
  4. Enter your prices. Fill in your entry price, close price, stop loss, and take profit. As you enter these, the form automatically calculates whether the trade was a win, loss, or break-even, and computes the P&L and risk-reward ratio.
  5. Enter the lot size. Your position size for this trade.
  6. Set the dates. Enter when the trade was opened and when it was closed. For backfilled trades, use the original dates — the calendar view will place them correctly.
  7. Add psychology fields (optional, PRO plan). Tag your emotion, setup type, and any mistakes. Add free-text notes about what you were thinking or what you observed.
  8. Attach screenshots (optional). Upload your entry chart, exit chart, or any analysis screenshots. These are stored in cloud storage and linked to the trade.
  9. Save. The trade appears immediately in your calendar and table views, and your analytics update to include it.

The whole process takes 30-60 seconds per trade once you get the rhythm down.

Trade Fields

Core Fields

  • Instrument — Select from your configured instrument list
  • Direction — Buy or Sell
  • Entry Price — Your entry price
  • Close Price — Actual close price
  • Stop Loss — Stop loss level
  • Take Profit — Take profit level
  • Lot Size — Position size
  • Open Date — When the trade was opened
  • Close Date — When the trade was closed

Calculated Fields (auto-filled)

  • Result — Win, Loss, or Break-even (derived from direction and prices)
  • P&L — Dollar profit/loss
  • Risk-Reward — Ratio based on entry/SL/TP distances

You do not need to calculate these yourself. As soon as you enter the core price fields and direction, the form derives whether the trade was a winner or loser, computes the dollar P&L, and calculates the risk-reward ratio based on the distance from entry to stop loss versus entry to take profit.

Psychology Fields (PRO plan)

  • Emotion — Select from your configured emotion presets (e.g., Confident, Anxious, FOMO, Revenge)
  • Setup — Tag the trade setup type (e.g., Break & Retest, Liquidity Sweep)
  • Mistakes — Log mistakes made (e.g., Moved SL, Early Entry, Oversize)
  • Notes — Free-text notes about the trade

Screenshots

Upload trade screenshots (entry chart, exit chart, analysis). Images are stored in cloud storage and linked to the trade record.

Psychology Annotation Workflow

Tagging emotions and mistakes on your trades is where the journal goes from “record of what happened” to “tool that actually improves your trading.” Here is how to get the most out of it:

Tag immediately after closing the trade. Your memory of what you were feeling is freshest right after the trade closes. Were you confident or anxious when you entered? Did you follow your plan or deviate? It only takes 10 seconds to select an emotion and a mistake tag, but that data becomes incredibly valuable when you have 50+ trades tagged and can see correlations in the analytics.

Be honest, not kind. The psychology fields are private — nobody sees them but you. If you took a trade out of revenge after a loss, tag it “Revenge.” If you oversized because you were trying to make back what you lost yesterday, tag it “Oversize.” The analytics can only show you the truth if you give it the truth.

Use notes for context that tags cannot capture. The emotion and mistake dropdowns cover the common cases, but sometimes you need more detail. Use the notes field for things like: “Entered because I saw the setup on someone’s Twitter, did not do my own analysis” or “Market was choppy after FOMC, should have sat out.” When you review these notes weeks later, they often reveal patterns that the tags alone do not.

Review psychology analytics weekly. Once you have 2-3 weeks of tagged trades, check the psychology analytics. You might discover that your win rate drops from 55% to 28% on trades tagged “FOMO,” or that trades tagged “Confident” have an average RR of 2.1 versus 0.8 on trades tagged “Anxious.” These numbers turn vague self-awareness (“I think I trade worse when I am emotional”) into concrete, actionable data (“I lose money 72% of the time when I trade from FOMO — I need a rule to prevent this”).

Editing Trades

Click any trade in the table or calendar to open the detail panel, then click Edit to modify any field. Changes are saved immediately.

This is especially useful for adding psychology data to auto-journaled trades. The Journal EA captures all the numbers, but it cannot know what you were feeling. After your trading session, open each trade and spend 10-15 seconds adding emotion tags, mistake tags, and a brief note. This small habit compounds into a rich dataset that the psychology analytics can actually work with.

Deleting Trades

Delete a trade from the detail panel. Deleted trades are removed permanently. Use this for duplicate entries or test trades — not for trades you wish had not happened. Your losing trades are some of the most valuable data in your journal.