Best trading journal for the FTMO challenge

The FTMO two-step challenge enforces profit targets, a max daily loss and a max drawdown, and the funded account keeps trading inside similar limits. Your journal should track daily loss, drawdown, progress toward the current step's profit target, plus win rate and profit factor — and record the setup, entry, exit, size, tags and notes for every trade. Dusk Analyst computes those analytics from your closed trades and tracks demo, live and funded accounts side by side. In our 2026 audit we checked 356 brokers and prop firms one by one against their own sites, and the brokers table on our home page shows the evidence for each one.

On Free, log trades manually or import them from your platform via CSV — that covers manual journaling of a challenge at $0, with no card required. FTMO runs MT4 and MT5, so Pro at $25 per month auto-syncs MT4, MT5 and cTrader and every closed trade lands in the journal automatically, with unlimited accounts, AI insights and full export. The journal never sees your broker password or login credentials; only your closed trades and the account nickname leave the terminal. Dusk Analyst never asks for your broker password or investor password, and nothing logs into your account from our servers. Data is stored on Cloudflare, identity is handled by Auth0, billing by Stripe, and the AI that answers your insight questions runs on DeepSeek.

Partly. The journal calculates your daily P&L for every trading day and your max drawdown, so you can check them against FTMO's Maximum Daily Loss and Maximum Loss yourself. It does not store FTMO's limits or warn you as you approach them. Dusk Analyst never asks for your broker password or investor password, and nothing logs into your account from our servers. Data is stored on Cloudflare, identity is handled by Auth0, billing by Stripe, and the AI that answers your insight questions runs on DeepSeek. The Free tier covers two accounts, which is enough to track a challenge; Pro at $25 per month adds unlimited accounts and auto-sync.

A payout depends on repeatable results, not one outsized day. The journal shows your win rate, profit factor and daily P&L distribution, and AI insights let you ask questions of your own history — like which sessions or setups produce your losses. Weekly reports keep the pattern visible, so you arrive at reviews with evidence instead of memory.

It helps you know exactly where you stand in both steps: current drawdown, daily loss, progress toward the profit target, win rate and profit factor are always visible. It does not guarantee passing a challenge — no journal can — and Dusk Analyst is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by FTMO. The execution and the risk decisions remain yours; the journal just makes them visible.

Yes. FTMO accounts on MT4, MT5 and cTrader connect to Dusk Analyst with the read-only EA or cBot: download it from your Dashboard, allow WebRequest for https://duskanalyst.com (MetaTrader only), attach it to any chart and paste your account's API key. The step-by-step guide is at duskanalyst.com/connect-mt5. Auto-sync is on Pro ($25/month); every new account gets it free for 5 trading days with no card, and adding a card extends that to 15 trading days free.

Yes. The free tier costs $0 forever and includes two accounts, manual trade entry and CSV import - enough to journal a live account properly, with win rate, expectancy, drawdown and equity curve all calculated for you. There is no credit card required to start. Pro ($25/month flat) adds unlimited accounts, MT4/MT5/cTrader auto-sync, AI insights on your trading (1,000 trade-analyses a month), monthly reports and full export, and every new account gets Pro free for 5 trading days with no card. The pricing is deliberately simple: one plan, one price, no per-feature upsells.

Yes, and it needs no card. Every new Dusk Analyst account gets Pro free for 5 trading days from sign-up: auto-sync from MT4, MT5 and cTrader, AI Insights with 1,000 credits, monthly reports and unlimited accounts. Add a card to keep it free for 10 more trading days; billing ($25/month) starts only after that, and you can cancel anytime from Billing in the app, with nothing charged.

Yes - CSV import is available on every plan, including free. If you've been tracking trades in a spreadsheet, broker export or another journal, export the CSV from wherever it lives and import it into Dusk Analyst; the journal matches it against your accounts and keeps your history continuous. Import is also the fallback for platforms that don't run MT4, MT5 or cTrader. For MT4/MT5/cTrader terminals, Pro auto-syncs going forward and the EA backfills any trades your terminal missed while it was off. Any platform that exports a CSV of your trade history works. Dusk Analyst recognises TradingView, Tradovate, cTrader, MT4 and MT5 exports on sight; for anything else you map your columns once and that parser is saved for next time. Comma, semicolon and tab files are all handled, day-first and month-first dates are detected from the file itself, and any row that cannot be read is listed for you rather than dropped quietly.

Pro includes 1,000 AI trade-analyses every month. One credit covers one trade, so asking a question about a 40-trade week costs 40 credits and you can keep asking. The allowance resets on the 1st of each month and the counter sits in the top bar of the app, so you always know where you stand. Narrowing a question to one account or a shorter date range makes the same allowance go much further. Free accounts get a small number of AI credits to try AI Insights, alongside the full journal, analytics and weekly reports, and the free Pro week (5 trading days, no card) includes the full monthly allowance.