Trading takes discipline, planning, and a willingness to learn from your own decisions. TradeBench gives traders a complete online journal system, without charging a cent.
The platform serves over 80,000 traders who use its tools to plan trades, manage risk, and try to improve their results.
What TradeBench Offers Traders
TradeBench offers a full-featured trading journal for free. You get trade planning tools, position sizing calculators, risk management features, and performance tracking.
You can journal trades across stocks, forex, crypto, CFDs, and futures. It’s not just a fancy spreadsheet, either.
TradeBench automates calculations, updates prices in real-time, and spits out performance reports. You can plan entries and exits before you even place a trade.
It tracks open positions and lets you review closed trades to spot patterns in your behavior.
Core Features That Support Trading Success
Trade Planning Tools
Trade planning tools help you get ready before jumping into a trade. You enter your entry price, stop loss, and target.
TradeBench calculates the reward-to-risk ratio automatically. It shows you potential profit and loss based on your position size.
You can make custom checklists for your trade plans. The system checks some items for you, like a minimum volume requirement.
If you set a rule, the platform verifies it before you can approve your trade plan.
Position Sizing Calculations
Position sizing decides how much to trade. TradeBench figures out optimal position sizes based on your risk settings.
You set your max risk percentage per trade. You also decide how much of your account you want to put on the line.
The system uses these settings every time you plan a trade. It calculates exact position sizes using your entry and stop-loss prices.
This takes the guesswork out of position sizing.
Open Trades Dashboard
The dashboard puts all your active positions in one place. Prices update automatically as the market moves.
You see unrealized profits and losses for each position. What-if calculations show possible outcomes at different price levels.
Every open trade links back to its original plan. This helps you stick to your strategy instead of making emotional decisions.
You can use multiple entries and exits, so scaling in or out is easy.
Trade Comparison Feature
If you’re weighing multiple opportunities, the comparison tool can help. Add potential trades quickly, no need for a full trade plan yet.
The system lays out these trades in a sortable table. Sort by reward-to-risk, your own ratings, or other metrics.
Once you pick a trade, you can convert it into a complete plan with position sizing.
How the Journal Improves Trading Performance
Documentation and Review Process
Every closed trade lands in your permanent journal. You can write notes about why you entered or exited.
Attach chart screenshots right to your journal entries. This captures what you were thinking and what the market looked like at the time.
The review feature nudges you to analyze trades after a cooling-off period. Waiting a few weeks brings more objectivity.
You spot what you did well and what needs work. Over time, this turns experience into real lessons.
Custom Labels and Reports
You can tag trades with labels for easy sorting. Labels might show the strategy, where the idea came from, or how you exited.
Filtered reports let you see performance by category. Reports show profit factor, average profit and loss, commission costs, and holding time.
You’ll see which strategies actually work for you. Maybe you do better with longs, shorts, or certain market sectors.
Performance Tracking Charts
Charts track your trading progress over time. Profit and loss charts show if you’re growing or shrinking your account.
Equity curves lay out the ups and downs of your returns. Sometimes charts reveal trends you’d miss just looking at numbers.
Risk Management Integration
Risk management features help protect your capital. You set three main rules:
– Max percentage to risk on any trade
– Max percentage of account value to risk per trade
– Max percentage of account to commit to one position
The system enforces these for every trade plan. It stops you from taking trades that break your own risk rules.
Sticking to these limits can take a lot of emotion out of risk decisions.
Support for Different Trading Styles
Paper Trading and Real Trading
You can use TradeBench for both paper trading and live accounts. Test strategies without risking real money.
Keep separate journals for simulated and real trades. That way, you can experiment without messing up your actual stats.
Multiple Markets and Instruments
TradeBench handles all sorts of financial instruments. Stock traders, forex traders, crypto traders, futures and CFD traders, they all use it.
You’re not locked into one market or asset class.
The Free Model Explained
TradeBench stays free thanks to sponsor partnerships, not user fees. Competing platforms might charge $29 to $49 a month, or $200 to $400 a year.
TradeBench just asks you to click one sponsor link per month. That covers their costs.
You’ll get at most one email a month with a sponsor link. They don’t share your email with anyone.
It’s a simple model that lets traders use pro tools without paying a subscription.
Getting Started with TradeBench
Signing up is quick, less than a minute, honestly. Just enter your name, email, and a password.
Once you’re in, you get access to everything. No trial period, no locked features.
It’s all browser-based. No software to download, nothing to install.
You can log in from any device with internet. Your data syncs automatically.
Real Trader Experiences
Hamid Esnaashari calls TradeBench comprehensive and amazing for a free tool. Julio Richardson says it’s “heaven sent” for traders who like to stay organized.
Mathias Burmeister likes the import/export features for Excel. He appreciates the trade planning tools that help keep emotions out of decisions.
They’re just a few of the 80,000 users who rely on TradeBench every day. They use it to plan trades, track performance, and learn from their results.
Practical Application for Daily Trading
Most traders follow a simple workflow with TradeBench. They plan trades using the position sizing tools.
They enter trades with sizes calculated by the system. They manage open positions through the dashboard.
They exit trades based on their plans. They review closed trades and look for ways to get better.
This routine brings consistency. It takes the guesswork out of sizing.
It gives you a record of decisions for future learning and helps you analyze your performance. Each step builds on the last, creating a real trading system.
My Conclusion
TradeBench brings solid trading journal features to the table, and you don’t have to pay a dime to use them.
It wraps up trade planning, risk management, and performance tracking in one spot.
You get all this for free because sponsors pick up the tab, so anyone can dive in.
Whether you’re into stocks, forex, crypto, or even futures, you’ll find what you need to keep tabs on your trades and try to get better.
With 80,000 active users, it’s clear, sometimes free tools really do stack up against the paid ones, especially when they’re built for real traders.