A crypto futures trading journal is only as useful as the fields you put in it. Log the wrong things and you’ve built a diary you’ll abandon by Friday. Log the right five or six and you get a map of exactly where your money leaks. This is the what-to-track companion to the process guide on how to journal futures trades that stick: that post is the habit, this one is the columns.
Why a futures journal is different from a spot journal
Spot trading is simple: you buy, you sell, you made or lost the difference. Futures adds three things a spot journal never has to measure — leverage, liquidation, and funding — and any one of them can turn a “good” trade into a loss and a “small” loss into a blown account. Your journal has to capture those explicitly, or it’s scoring the wrong game and flattering you while your edge quietly bleeds out in costs.
The fields that actually matter
You don’t need thirty columns. You need the handful that let you find patterns later. Here’s the core set and the job each one does:
| Field | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Setup | The pattern you were trading. Without it you can’t tell which edge is real. |
| Direction & leverage | Long or short, and how much leverage — i.e. how close you were to liquidation. |
| Entry / stop / exit | The three prices that define the trade and let you compute everything else. |
| R-multiple | Result measured in units of initial risk, not dollars — the only comparable metric. |
| Fees & funding | The quiet tax that turns a break-even strategy into a losing one. |
| Mood at entry | Calm, FOMO, tilted, tired — the one column that explains most blowups. |
| Mistake tags | No stop, oversized, revenge entry, held through funding — countable regret. |
R-multiple: the metric most traders skip
Dollars lie. A +$200 trade sounds better than a −$50 trade, but if you risked $400 to make $200 and only $10 to lose $50, the small loss was the better decision. R-multiple fixes this by expressing every result as a multiple of what you risked:
R = (exit − entry) ÷ (entry − stop) // signed by direction
Risked $10, made $20 → +2R
Risked $10, lost $10 → −1RTrack it and your averages — average win in R, average loss in R, and win rate — tell you whether your strategy is actually positive-expectancy, independent of how big your account happened to be that month. Because R depends entirely on your stop distance, it’s inseparable from sizing; the mechanics live in how to size a futures position by risk, and you can get the exact numbers from the free position size calculator. For the underlying idea, this is textbook risk management applied trade by trade.
Track fees and funding or your edge is a mirage
Perpetual futures charge funding every few hours, and every fill pays a taker or maker fee. On a high-frequency or heavily-leveraged style, these can quietly eat your entire edge. If your journal shows positive gross P&L but negative net after fees and funding, you don’t have a strategy problem — you have a cost problem, and it stays invisible until you log it as its own column. This is also the easiest column to automate: it comes straight off your exchange, which is the whole argument for auto-syncing your trades rather than typing them in.
Leverage and liquidation: the column that saves accounts
Direction and leverage aren’t just trivia — together with your entry they tell you how far price can move before the exchange closes the position for you. On an isolated 20× long, a move of roughly 5% against you wipes the margin; at 5× you have about four times the room. Logging leverage per trade lets you answer a question memory can’t: “how often am I trading in liquidation range instead of stop range?” If your stops sit closer than your liquidation price you’re fine; if they don’t, you’re not really running a stop, you’re running a prayer. The fix is upstream, in how you size the position — but you can only see the problem if the leverage column exists.
A sample row
Concretely, one filled-in trade looks like this — the numbers on the left come from the exchange, the tags on the right come from you:
| Column | Value |
|---|---|
| Setup | Range breakout (BTC) |
| Direction / leverage | Long · 10× |
| Entry / stop / exit | 65,000 / 64,000 / 66,950 |
| R-multiple | +1.95R |
| Fees + funding | −$3.10 |
| Mood | Calm |
| Mistake tags | — (clean) |
Review the aggregate, weekly — not per-trade
One trade tells you nothing; fifty tagged trades tell you everything. Once a week, group by setup and by mood and read the totals. You’ll find the uncomfortable truth fast — that your win rate craters after a loss (the mechanism behind revenge trading), that one setup carries all your profit, or that you only lose after midnight. Fix the single most expensive pattern, then repeat.
Postmortem captures all of this automatically — it syncs each fill from your exchange, computes R-multiple, nets out fees and funding, and tags the mistakes — so the journal exists whether or not you feel like keeping one. But the fields matter more than the tool: start tracking these, in a spreadsheet if you have to, and your futures trading will get measurably sharper.