After researching past ET threads regarding trade logs and trade journals it appears that tradelog and gainskeeper are the two most popular choices for Tax/tradelogs. Which product is the most intuitive and reliable for swing trading equities and medium volume intraday futures trading of the ES, YM, NQ and ER2? (2,000+ round trips/year) My primary broker is IB, however, I would like to integrate my accounts with Tradestation and Wells Fargo brokerages as well. Secondly, Has anyone had any experience with stocktickr pro or similar product for maintaining their daily trading journal http://www.stocktickr.com/ ? Or perhaps could recommend a good trading journal product? I currently use an excel spreadsheet, however, with increased trading activity the data entry is tedious and inefficient. I would like to automate the data entry and create default notes, comments etc... so I may focus my time on performance analysis. Any advice or product suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you kindly.
Hi, I've only tried TradeLog and GainsKeeper demos. For active traders doing large number of trades they seem a bit expensive to me. I am using stocktickr pro, not for accounting purposes, although you could get reports on all your trades. It's strength for me is in helping you analyse your trades and performance of different variables you use to qualify your trades. Basically based on your tagging it can show you what variables the great trades had and what the not-so-great ones had I'm also with IB so I'm using their plugin. It will let you read trades directly from TWS and post them to stocktickr. Saves time and hassle. For stocks it will generate you charts in various different timeframes and for futures you could upload your own charts images if you want to review them. Quite a neat service I think.
I use tradelog It is easy to use and cost effective for an active trader. They have excellent responsive support which is almost immediate or at the most 24 hours for off hour questions, and when the broker changes formats or there is some issue with imports, they fix the bug almost on demand. Tradelog charges a flat fee and you can trade as much as you want. Very inexpensive for active day traders. Gainskeeper charges you per bucket of trades. They have no support except email which is slow and sometimes they answer with an incorrect understanding of what you asked and you have to ask again. Waiting 5 days for a response to a problem is way to long. Impossible to get human help. Having used both of these I re up my Tradelog software every year and save myself 1000's of dollars in accountant fees . I also save huge over what Gainskeeper wants to charge.