A practice log worth keeping: five numbers per trade
The Binance help page puts "all export features" on the list of things futures demo does not support (the spot demo list names trading bots and copy trading), and says Customer Support cannot see the order details of demo trades. So anything you want to review later, you have to write down yourself.
The good news is that it does not take much. Five fields, one line per trade, in a notes app or on paper.
In this article
Which five
| Field | Example | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The price I intended to enter at | The number in your head before you order | Write it before placing; written after, it is worthless |
| 2. The average price I actually got | From the fill | Trade history |
| 3. What share of my available funds this was | A percentage | Work it out; do not just record the amount |
| 4. Fees | Entry and exit | Trade history |
| 5. Why I entered, and what would make me exit | One sentence | Your own words, the shorter the better |
The fifth is not a number, and it is the most valuable column in the table. Without it the other four are a ledger.
Why these five
Each corresponds to a mistake you may be making without seeing it.
One and two together measure execution drift. If they are routinely far apart, you are either chasing with market orders or hesitating too long before placing.
Three is the sneaky one. Record amounts only and you cannot see your position size creeping upward. The common progression is small sizes, a run of wins, quietly multiplied size, then a correction.
Four builds cost awareness. Fees are a larger share of a small trade than most beginners think, charged on entry and again on exit — the arithmetic is here.
Five tests whether you had a plan. If you cannot write what would make you exit, you are gambling. Not a moral judgement — a description: you are holding a position with no exit condition.
Paper, notes app or spreadsheet
All three work. Pick the one you will actually open; the enemy here is not the tool, it is stopping after three days.
- Notes app: lowest friction, worst for totting up at month end. Fine for the first fortnight.
- Paper: the act of writing adds a second's thought, which occasionally cancels an impulsive trade. Easy to lose.
- Spreadsheet: five columns fit naturally and sorting and summing are trivial. Worth it if you plan to keep this up beyond a month.
My advice is to start in a notes app for two weeks, and only move to a spreadsheet once you know you will keep going. Building an elaborate template on day one is how most people quit by day five — the ritual becomes the burden.
When to write each part
Field 1 must be written before the order. Written afterwards, people unconsciously record their fill price as "what I intended", which destroys the whole point.
The other four go in once the trade is closed. Not during — the floating number will drag your judgement around.
Reading it back a month later
Once you have twenty or thirty lines, do not look at the total. Look at these:
- What field 5 says on the losing lines. Mostly blank, or "felt like it would go up"? Then what needs fixing is not your coin selection, it is deciding before acting.
- Whether field 3 is trending up. That is unconscious escalation, the commonest slide there is.
- The sum of field 4. Put a month of fees next to your net result; for a lot of people that is the moment it becomes obvious why they never get ahead.
- When the gap between 1 and 2 is widest. If it clusters in volatile periods, you are using market orders at exactly the wrong times.
A realistic way to read it
Suppose thirteen of twenty lines are losses. Sorted by field 3, the four worst losses are all two or three times the proportion of the rest. That does not say "I always lose" — it says "I lose when I bet heavily".
That is a completely different diagnosis from "my judgement is bad", and it calls for a different fix: position discipline, not chart study. Without the log you would just conclude you are no good at this.
Another: if field 4 totals more than half your total losses, your real opponent is your own trading frequency. The effective response is to halve the number of trades next month and look again.
The value of the table is not precision, it is that it turns behaviour from memory into record. People flatter themselves about their own trading — losses get forgotten, wins get remembered as insight. Ink does not cooperate with that.
When you can stop
You do not need to do this forever. The log exists to reveal your pattern; once revealed, its job is done.
Two signals that you can stop: you find yourself thinking through all five fields before ordering without being prompted, and a stretch of entries stops producing new findings — the same issues recur and you already know about them.
Two situations where you should restart: you move to a new product line, and a run of losses makes you want to add to a position. The second especially, because that is the moment you most need external evidence and your memory is least reliable.
Keep it for a while and the third readiness test — being able to explain a loss — suddenly gets easier, because you have the evidence in front of you. The three tests are here.
"All export features" sits on the not-supported list in "How to Use Binance Demo Trading" in the Binance help centre, checked September 2026. Which is exactly why the log has to be one you keep yourself.