Crypto Trading Journal: Tracking Spot, Futures and Perpetual Trades

Crypto markets trade every hour of every day, across many exchanges, with spot, futures and perpetual contracts. That makes journaling both more important and more complicated than for stocks.

What makes crypto different

• 24/7 trading. There is no close. You need your own definition of a "day" for daily P&L, and your own limits on trading hours.
• Multiple exchanges. Positions are spread across platforms, each with its own export format.
• Fees in different currencies. Fees may be paid in the quote currency, the base currency or an exchange token.
• Funding payments on perpetual futures. See funding rates.
• High volatility. Moves of 5% in a day are ordinary for many coins.

What to record

• Exchange and account.
• Instrument type: spot, dated futures or perpetual.
• Entry, exit, size and leverage.
• Fees, converted to one currency.
• Funding payments received or paid.
• Setup, stop and reason, as with any trade.

Choose a reference time

Pick a daily cut-off, such as midnight UTC or midnight in your time zone, and use it consistently for daily P&L and your calendar. Without it, daily statistics are ambiguous.

Metrics that matter

• Results by hour. In a 24/7 market, your time-of-day results matter even more. See best trading hours.
• Results by coin. Most coins move with Bitcoin, so check whether your results are really diversified. See correlation risk.
• Funding costs as a share of P&L.
• Leverage used compared with risk planned. High leverage with a tight stop can still be small risk, and low leverage with no stop can be huge risk.

Size by volatility

Because volatility varies so much, fixed position sizes give wildly different risk. Use your stop distance or ATR to size each trade. See ATR stop loss.

Taxes

In many countries, crypto trades are taxable events, including swaps between coins. Keep complete records from every exchange. See trading records to keep.

In TradeThink

TradeThink imports from Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Bybit and OKX, and can sync automatically with supported exchanges using read-only API keys. Crypto appears as its own asset class, so you can compare it with the rest of your trading.