Anyone trading regularly with Interactive Brokers or an introducing broker (reseller) of IBKR ends up with a few hundred transactions after a year: trades and option legs, exercises, assignments and expiries, dividends and withholding tax, interest and fees, deposits and withdrawals, internal transfers and corporate actions such as splits. The account statement lists them all, but it answers none of the questions a trader actually asks. How did each strategy do over twelve months? How deep was the largest drawdown? How many of the iron condors were closed before expiry and at what share of the original premium?
Trading journal software exists for these questions. This guide explains what such software does, where the differences between local and cloud-based solutions lie, how the import from Interactive Brokers works technically and which German-language options exist.
What trading journal software does
At its core, a trading journal is a database of all trades with an evaluation layer on top. The software receives individual executions, combines them into trades (a purchase and a later sale of the same stock are one trade, four option legs executed together belong to one position and whether that is an iron condor, a butterfly or a ratio spread follows from strikes, type and direction of the legs) and calculates metrics from them: realised and unrealised profit, holding period, share of commissions, win rate per strategy, account curve over time.
Trades, however, are only part of what happens on an account. Good trading journal software also processes the remaining account events. Exercise, assignment and expiry of options close a position or turn it into stock, while deposits and withdrawals and internal transfers between accounts change the account value without any trading. Then there are dividends and withholding tax, credit and margin interest and fees for broker, currency conversion and stock lending. And corporate actions such as splits and symbol renames require that a position is still kept as the same one. These entries belong in a cash flow ledger separated by type, as an overlay on the account value curve and in the reconciliation: opening balance, deposits and withdrawals, realised profit, income and costs, currency effects and the unrealised profit of the open positions have to add up to the account value. If one of these categories is missing, the gap between trade result and account balance stays unexplained.
Then there is documentation. Notes, tags, error categories and screenshots can be attached to every trade. If you want to know three months later why you closed a trade early, the answer is in the journal, not in your memory. This qualitative layer is the part an account statement can never deliver.
What a journal is not: a trading system. It offers no entry or exit suggestions, it describes what happened. The trader draws the conclusions.
Which evaluations a journal has to deliver
The value of a journal is not created at import, it is created at the evaluation. A win rate on its own says little: a strategy can win in four out of five cases and still lose money if the fifth case is bigger than the four wins together. Only profit factor and expectancy put wins and losses in relation to each other and turn a rate into a statement.
The second layer is risk. A profit of 1000 dollars means something different when 500 dollars were at stake at entry than when it was 5000. For that, a journal records the initial stop or the maximum planned loss at opening and measures the result against it. This metric is called risk-reward ratio or R-multiple and it makes trades of different sizes comparable.
The third layer is the path. An account value curve shows the result over time, a drawdown curve shows how far the account sat below its previous high. What matters there is not only the depth of the largest setback, but also how long it lasted and what share of the total time the account spent under water.
The decisive point is that all of this can be calculated not just for the whole account, but also by strategy, asset class, symbol and period. And that a metric leads back to the trades it came from. A number without that route cannot be verified.
Manual, Excel or software?
Many traders start with a spreadsheet. That works as long as it is a few stock trades per month. With options it quickly becomes unmanageable: a spread consists of two legs, a roll of four executions, an assignment turns an option into a stock position. Anyone who wants to model that correctly in Excel maintains formulas and cross-references by hand for every position and the effort grows with every roll.
The second route is manual entry in a journal app. Anyone trading a few times a month keeps every entry under their own control that way. With a rising number of executions, however, the number of chances to miss one or file it wrongly rises too. The third route is automatic import straight from the broker. The software fetches every execution itself, groups it and does the maths. The trader only adds notes and tags. As trading frequency rises, this route lowers the effort and the number of transfer errors.
Local or cloud: where the difference lies
Most journal providers are cloud services: you log in through the browser, give the provider access to your broker account or upload files and the evaluation runs on their servers. The advantage is obvious: no installation, access from any device, including the phone. The price is that your complete trading history, including account number, position sizes and profits, is processed and stored on the provider's infrastructure. Where those servers stand and how long the data stays there is in the privacy policy of the service in question.
Local trading journal software runs as a desktop app on your own machine. The database is a file in your user directory, the broker import runs directly between your machine and the broker, with no intermediary. The journal data is not uploaded to the provider, database and backups stay as files with you and are not tied to a cloud account. Anyone using a feature that involves an external service, an AI analysis for instance, does transfer the data selected for it to that service. The downside: the data is tied to the machine, access from the phone requires a solution of your own and installing an update is your job, even if the app points it out.
The second difference is the pricing model. Cloud services almost always bill by subscription, monthly or yearly, often tiered by number of accounts or trades. Local software is more often sold as an annual or a perpetual license, independent of trading volume. Over several years that is a noticeable difference, especially for active option traders with many executions.
Which variant fits better depends on your own weighting. If data ownership and independence from the provider weigh heavily and you work at the desktop anyway, you end up with a local solution. If you use several brokers outside IBKR or want to journal from the phone, a cloud service serves you better.
How the import from Interactive Brokers works
Interactive Brokers offers three ways to get at your own executions and good journal software uses at least two of them. The first is the TWS API: the Trader Workstation or the IB Gateway opens a local port on your machine through which an application can query executions, positions and quotes. This only works while the TWS is running, but it is real-time and gives access to market data.
The second is the Flex Web Service. In the Client Portal you create a Flex query and receive a token. With it, the software can fetch the executions of the last days or months as XML, without the TWS running. This is the most convenient route for daily import and, unlike the TWS API, a way to backfill up to 365 days of history. For options one detail matters here: every leg of a combo order gets its own order id. Software that groups legs by order id splits every spread into single trades.
The third is the CSV export of an account statement (activity statement). It suits a one-off import of old history or introducing brokers that offer no Flex queries. Introducing brokers such as CapTrader, LYNX or Estably run on the IBKR infrastructure, so all three routes usually work there too. An overview is on the brokers page.
What matters with options
With simple stock positions, matching buys and sells is comparatively direct. With options, the quality of the grouping decides whether the journal is usable. An iron condor is four legs that have to be kept as one position, with one combined premium and one combined result. Rolling one side of the iron condor closes two legs and opens two new ones, rolling the whole structure replaces all four. In both cases the new legs still belong to the same trade. An assignment turns a short put into a stock position that should stay linked to the option in the journal.
Good software recognises the strategy from the legs: vertical spread, straddle, strangle, iron condor, butterfly, covered call. It tracks splits and symbol renames so a position does not suddenly show up as two different instruments after a stock split. And it calculates profit per position including commissions, not just per execution. If you check these points while trialling a software, you will see within an hour whether it suits your trading style.
German-language trading journal software at a glance
The market for journal software is dominated by English-language products. TradeZella, TraderSync, Tradervue and Edgewonk are cloud services with broad broker support, interface and support in English, billed in US dollars. For traders using several brokers outside IBKR they are the obvious choice.
In the German-speaking market the options are few. Visual Trading Journal from Germany is a web app for Interactive Brokers and its introducing brokers, with a German interface, automatic import and a focus on option writing, billed as a monthly or yearly subscription. Foliograph from Switzerland is local trading journal software as a desktop app for macOS and Windows, also specialised in the IBKR infrastructure, with an interface in German and English, personal support in both languages, integrated market data and an annual license with no automatic renewal. A direct comparison of the three approaches is on the comparison page.
Checklist for choosing
Before you decide on a software, a trial with your own data is worth it. Most providers offer two to four weeks free. These questions help with the check:
- Where does my data live and who has access to it?
- Does the import run automatically and by which route (TWS API, Flex, CSV)?
- Are option combos kept correctly as one position, even after a roll?
- How does the software handle splits, assignments and symbol renames?
- Is the profit per position, including commissions, traceable?
- Can win rate, profit factor, expectancy and drawdown be evaluated by strategy and period as well?
- Is the result of a trade measured against the risk taken at entry?
- Does the route from a metric lead back to the trades it came from?
- Are dividends, interest, fees, deposits and withdrawals and transfers imported, shown separately and reconciled with the account value?
- Subscription or license and what does it cost over three years?
- In which language are interface and support and who answers?
- What happens to my data if I cancel or the provider shuts down?
Frequently asked questions about trading journal software
Do I have to enter every trade manually?
No. Software with a broker connection fetches the executions automatically, with Interactive Brokers through the TWS API or the Flex Web Service. You only add notes, tags and screenshots by hand.
Can I keep a trading journal offline?
With a local desktop app, yes. Journal and evaluations live on your machine and work without internet. You only need a connection to import new trades from the broker, for quote data and for the optional AI review.
What does trading journal software cost?
Cloud services mostly range from 20 to 60 euros or dollars per month, tiered by accounts and trades. Local software is more often sold as an annual or one-off license. Foliograph costs CHF 260 per license year, with no automatic renewal.
Is there trading journal software with support in German?
Yes. Visual Trading Journal from Germany and Foliograph from Switzerland both offer a German interface and German-language support. At Foliograph I answer personally by email, in German or English.
Does Foliograph support multi-leg option strategies?
Yes. Foliograph derives the strategy from the legs and recognises vertical spreads, iron condors, straddles, strangles, covered calls and butterflies including broken wing and ratio variants, among others. A roll stays part of the same trade.
What happens on an assignment?
The assignment is recognised at import. An assigned short put turns into a stock position that stays linked to the original option position, so the combined result stays traceable.
Which data leaves my machine?
Not the journal database. Outbound connections go to the broker for the import, to the market data sources and once an hour for the update check. With the optional AI review, the trade data selected for it goes to the provider whose API key you entered.