Crypto trading journal for spot and futures traders

In crypto the gap between what a trade looked like on the chart and what it left in the account is often fees, funding and leverage mistakes. This page covers how to journal spot and futures trades honestly, which numbers matter more than leverage, and how Haunted keeps it all in a free journal.

Spot and futures are different kinds of trades

On spot you own the coin: there is no liquidation, the main costs are the spread and trading fees, and a position can be held as long as you like. Perpetual futures add leverage, a liquidation price and funding payments, so the same idea can have a very different outcome depending on where it was traded. Mixing the two in one undifferentiated list makes the statistics misleading. In Haunted you can keep a separate account per exchange or per market type and add tags such as spot, perp, long or short, then compare results across them. Each trade records outcome, net P/L, R:R, risk, session, model, notes and a pasted chart screenshot, which is enough to understand later what exactly happened.

Leverage does not set your risk, your stop does

A common mistake is to treat leverage as the measure of risk. The loss on a trade is determined by position size and the distance to the stop: a 10,000 dollar position with a stop 1 percent away loses about 100 dollars whether it is opened with 5x or 20x leverage. Leverage only changes how much margin is locked and how close the liquidation price sits. That is why a journal should record risk in money or as a percentage of the account and the result in R, not the leverage number. Before entering, check that liquidation lies well beyond the stop. In Haunted you log risk and R:R for each trade, so trades with different leverage stay comparable on one scale.

Fees and funding belong in your PnL

Trading fees are charged on the full notional of a position, on both entry and exit. With a typical taker fee of 0.05 percent, a 10,000 dollar position costs about 10 dollars round trip; if you risked 100 dollars, that is 0.1R taken from every trade before the market moves at all. On perpetual futures add funding, usually paid every few hours on many exchanges: when the rate is positive, longs pay shorts, and a position held for days can lose a noticeable share of its profit this way. Gross PnL hides all of this. In Haunted the trade's P/L is entered as net, after fees and funding, so the equity curve shows what actually reached the account.

The market runs 24/7, but sessions still matter

Crypto never closes, yet activity is far from even. Volume and volatility typically rise when Europe and the United States are active, the Asian hours often behave differently, and weekends usually bring thinner liquidity and sharper moves on less news. Many traders find that most of their losses come from trades taken late at night or on Saturday out of boredom. Tag each trade with its session and let the numbers speak. Haunted breaks down win rate, expectancy and P/L by session, model and pair, and the calendar heatmap makes weak days of the week visible at a glance. If weekends are consistently negative, the simplest improvement is not to trade them.

Bitcoin, majors and altcoins

Results on BTC and ETH and results on small altcoins usually differ a lot. Altcoins have wider spreads, more slippage and stronger moves, and most of them follow bitcoin, so several long positions on alts at the same time are effectively one large bet on the market. A journal helps to separate skill from beta: if your alt trades only win when bitcoin is rising, the edge belongs to the market rather than to the entry model. Haunted shows statistics for each pair separately, and tags let you mark conditions such as trend, range or news. After a few dozen trades it becomes clear which coins deserve your attention and which only feed the exchange through fees.

Manual entry instead of exchange APIs

Haunted does not connect to exchanges by API and does not import trades from Binance, Bybit or other platforms automatically. Trades are entered manually or imported from CSV, for example if you already keep history in a spreadsheet, and from Notion. For most discretionary traders manual entry is an advantage rather than a cost: it takes about a minute, forces you to record why you entered and how you managed the position, and keeps the journal free of noise from partial fills and transfers. The journal runs in the browser on a computer and on a phone, so a trade can be logged right after it closes.

FAQ

Can Haunted connect to Binance or Bybit by API?

No. Haunted has no exchange API connection and no automatic sync. Trades are entered manually with a pasted chart screenshot or imported from CSV and Notion. Manual entry takes about a minute and doubles as a short review of each trade.

How do I account for fees and funding?

Enter the trade's P/L as net, after trading fees on both entry and exit and any funding paid or received. That way the equity curve, expectancy and drawdown reflect what really reached the account, not the price move on the chart.

Should I record leverage in a crypto trading journal?

You can mention it in tags or notes, but the key numbers are risk in money or percent and the result in R. Leverage changes margin and liquidation distance, while the loss is set by position size and stop distance.

Can I keep spot and futures in one journal?

Yes. Create separate accounts for exchanges or market types and use tags such as spot and perp. Analytics can be viewed across everything or filtered by account, so you can compare how the same model performs on spot and on futures.

Is the crypto trading journal free?

Yes. Haunted is entirely free, with no paid tier for the journal and no trial. Logging, analytics, backtests, ideas, documents and share links are all included, and registration with email or Google takes under a minute.