Trading Journal: Automatic Trade Capture
Every trade on your connected accounts lands in your journal on its own, reconciled against your broker's records.
6 min read
MimikTrader's journal builds itself from your broker activity. As fills happen on your connected accounts — whether the trade originated on a leader account or copied through to a follower — MimikTrader captures the entry, the exit, the contract, the size, and the P&L, and adds it to your journal automatically. There is nothing to log and nothing to import.
Where Journal Entries Come From
Every row in your journal traces back to a real fill your broker reported on one of your connected accounts. That includes trades you placed directly on a leader account and trades MimikTrader replicated onto a follower account — both show up, and each is tagged with the account it happened on. If you run a group with one leader and three followers copying the same setup, you'll see four separate journal entries for that trade, one per account, because each account has its own broker-confirmed fills and its own P&L.
This account-level view matters for a copier: it lets you compare how the same trade actually performed across accounts with different sizing multipliers, rather than collapsing everything into a single blended number that hides account-to-account differences.
Broker-Reconciled P&L
Every closed trade shows a P&L number as soon as it closes — MimikTrader calculates it immediately from the entry and exit prices. In the background, your P&L is then checked against your broker's own records. When the broker's confirmed figures come in and match up, that trade's P&L is upgraded to the broker-confirmed number and treated as final.
In practice this means the number you see the moment a trade closes is a very close estimate, and it can tighten slightly — typically by the cost of fees and commissions attaching once they're confirmed — as reconciliation catches up. This happens automatically in the background. Dashboard has a Sync button if you want to pull the latest broker reports immediately. If you ever want the details on what a specific number means, see Journal Numbers Look Wrong?
Strategies, Tags, and Notes
Raw fill data only tells you what happened — strategies, tags, and notes let you record why, so your journal becomes something you can actually learn from.
- Strategies: Define your own named strategies (for example, "ES Opening Range" or "NQ News Fade") and assign one to any trade from the trade detail view. Group performance by strategy later in Reports to see which setups are actually working.
- Tags: Free-form labels you can apply to any trade — mistakes, mindset notes, market conditions, whatever you want to track. Tags can be grouped into categories so a busy tag list stays organized.
- Notes: A free-text field on every trade for writing out what you saw, what you planned, and what actually happened. Useful for the trades you want to revisit later, good or bad.
None of this is required — trades capture and reconcile with or without tags, strategies, or notes attached. They exist purely to help you organize and review, and you can add them any time after a trade closes, not just in the moment.
Per-Account Rows for Copied Trades
Because the journal is built from actual broker fills rather than a single synthetic "group" record, copied trades are transparent by account. You can filter the journal down to one account to review exactly how that account traded a setup, or look across all accounts in a group to compare execution and sizing side by side. This is especially useful when accounts in the same group run different sizing multipliers — the journal shows you the real dollar outcome on each one, not just a scaled projection.
Notes do not have to be typed once per account. Open the trade you want as the source, save the note, then Share this journal. Rows on your other accounts in the same contract family (NQ and MNQ count as one) that opened and closed within three seconds of it are pre-ticked (labelled Same time). Other rows that closed within ten minutes are listed too, and Show all reaches the rest. You can untick or add others, then Apply. Being in the same group is not enough on its own — a follower can still trade on their own. Only the rows you leave ticked are marked journaled. Unlink keeps a copy of the note on that account so you can write something different.
On Trade View, the Journal filter narrows the list to trades that already have a note or to the ones you still have to write up. Shared copies count as journaled. The Time chip switches trade, order, chart and last-saved times between 24-hour and 12-hour (AM/PM); the choice is remembered on this browser.
What You Won't Find
The journal only reflects what your broker actually reports — every row exists because a real fill happened on a connected account. If a trade isn't in your journal, MimikTrader hasn't seen a matching broker fill for it yet.
Where to Go Next
Once you have journal entries building up, head to the Reports & Analytics Guide to see how MimikTrader turns that raw trade history into performance reports, a P&L calendar, strategy scorecards, and the Mimik Score. If a number in your journal looks off, start with Journal Numbers Look Wrong? before contacting support.