New — AI Trade Insights now reads your journal and tells you exactly where you leak money. See how →

Recommended platforms

The platforms we trade on, and journal from

ZalorTrade is the journal, not the terminal. These are the trading platforms, data feeds, brokers, and prop firms our traders use to analyse markets and place orders — and the ones whose fills we build our importers around.

Explore NinjaTraderHow trade sync works

NinjaTrader® is a registered trademark of NinjaTrader Group, LLC. No NinjaTrader company has any affiliation with the owner, developer, or provider of the products or services described herein, or any interest, ownership or otherwise, in any such product or service, or endorses, recommends or approves any such product or service.

Disclosure: Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you download a platform or open an account through them, ZalorTrade may receive compensation at no additional cost to you. Compensation never changes the disclosures on this page, and nothing here is a recommendation to trade or an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Brokers & platforms

Where our traders execute

Platforms ZalorTrade reads fills from, so your journal fills itself instead of being retyped.

ProjectX

Platform gateway

API gateway that hosts accounts for Topstep, Alpha Futures, and 19+ other firms.

Trade import — coming soon

Rithmic

Execution platform

Low-latency futures routing behind Apex, Bulenox, and other funded-account programs.

Trade import — coming soon

Prop firms

Funded-account programs we support

Prop firms provision accounts on the platforms above, so evaluation and funded trades land in the same journal as everything else.

Topstep

Prop firm

Funded futures accounts provisioned through ProjectX.

Trade import — coming soon

Apex Trader Funding

Prop firm

Evaluation and funded accounts on Tradovate and Rithmic.

Trade import — coming soon

MyFundedFutures

Prop firm

Funded futures accounts provisioned through Tradovate.

Trade import — coming soon

Alpha Futures

Prop firm

Funded futures accounts provisioned through ProjectX.

Trade import — coming soon

Take Profit Trader

Prop firm

Funded futures accounts provisioned through Tradovate.

Trade import — coming soon

Bulenox

Prop firm

Funded futures accounts on Tradovate and Rithmic.

Trade import — coming soon

Using a trading journal alongside NinjaTrader

NinjaTrader answers what happened: which contract, what price, what time, how much. A journal answers why — the setup you thought you saw, the level you were trading against, the plan you had for the exit, and whether you followed it. Both records are necessary, and neither substitutes for the other. Execution data without reasoning tells you that you lost money on Tuesday; reasoning without execution data is a diary.

The practical split is simple. Analyse and trade in the platform, then keep the trade's story in the journal: a screenshot of the chart as you saw it at entry, the setup tag, your planned stop and target, and one honest sentence about your state of mind. That takes seconds per trade and turns a month of fills into something you can actually interrogate at the weekend.

What you get back is the answer to the only question that changes your P&L: which of your setups pay, and which quietly bleed. Tag consistently for thirty or forty trades and the pattern stops being an opinion. Most traders find at least one setup or one time window that loses reliably — and cutting it is the fastest improvement available to them.

Getting your NinjaTrader fills into your journal

NinjaTrader keeps your executions and trades in its own performance reporting, and those grids can be exported to a delimited file — the exact menu path shifts between versions, so follow your version's own documentation rather than a screenshot on someone's blog. Whatever the route, the output you want is one row per execution or per trade, with instrument, direction, quantity, entry and exit price, timestamps, and commissions.

That file imports straight into ZalorTrade from the Trades page: map the columns once and the history lands with P&L recalculated, so you are reviewing your own numbers rather than retyping them. Fees and commissions matter here — a futures strategy that looks like a winner gross can be flat net of round-turn costs, and the only way to see that is to import the cost column instead of ignoring it.

Automatic sync is in build for the platforms our importers target, listed above. Until it ships, the export-and-import loop takes a couple of minutes a week, and manual quick entry covers the trades you want journalled the moment you close them, while the reasoning is still fresh.

What futures traders should tag that other traders don't

Futures journals need a few fields equities journals can skip. Record the contract, not just the symbol — ES and MES behave the same on a chart and very differently in your risk arithmetic, and a quarterly roll means "the same trade" spans different instruments across a year. Recording ticks alongside dollars keeps your R-multiples comparable when you change size or switch contract.

Session matters more in futures than almost anywhere else. The same setup behaves differently in the Asian session, the European open, the New York cash open, and the afternoon drift. Tag the session on every trade and your calendar will start showing you which hours you should be flat.

If you trade a funded or evaluation account, log the account alongside the trade. Prop firm rules — daily loss limits, trailing drawdown, consistency requirements — mean the same trade can be fine in one account and a violation in another. Journalling per account is what lets you see whether you failed an evaluation because of your strategy or because of your sizing.

Why market data quality changes what your review is worth

Every conclusion in your journal rests on the data your charts were drawn from. Filtered ticks and gaps in history do not announce themselves — they quietly flatter a backtest, misprice a level, and make a setup look more reliable than it was. If you are going to make decisions from a chart or a simulated result, the feed underneath it has to be clean first.

This is the argument for a dedicated data service such as Kinetick rather than whatever is cheapest: unfiltered real-time ticks for the session you actually trade, and deep history for the replay and backtesting you review with. Pricing and exchange entitlements are set by the data vendor and the exchanges, so check the current plans on their site.

It is also why we treat backtested and simulated results as hypothetical everywhere in the product, and why the CFTC Rule 4.41 disclosure sits at the foot of this page. A simulated result is a hypothesis about your strategy, not a record of your trading — useful for forming a plan, never evidence that the plan works.

Keep exploring

How the journal itself works

Trade journal

Log a futures trade in seconds, with screenshots, setup tags, and your thesis.

Broker sync & CSV import

Bring NinjaTrader history in from a file today, automatically once sync ships.

For futures traders

Contracts, sessions, ticks, and funded accounts — journaling built for futures.

FAQ

Platforms & partners

Risk disclosures, trademarks & disclaimers

Futures risk disclosure: Futures and forex trading contains substantial risk and is not for every investor. An investor could potentially lose all or more than the initial investment. Risk capital is money that can be lost without jeopardizing one's financial security or lifestyle. Only risk capital should be used for trading and only those with sufficient risk capital should consider trading. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.

Hypothetical performance disclosure: Hypothetical performance results have many inherent limitations, some of which are described below. No representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve profits or losses similar to those shown. In fact, there are frequently sharp differences between hypothetical performance results and the actual results subsequently achieved by any particular trading program. One of the limitations of hypothetical performance results is that they are generally prepared with the benefit of hindsight. In addition, hypothetical trading does not involve financial risk, and no hypothetical trading record can completely account for the impact of financial risk in actual trading. For example, the ability to withstand losses or to adhere to a particular trading program in spite of trading losses are material points which can also adversely affect actual trading results. There are numerous other factors related to the markets in general or to the implementation of any specific trading program which cannot be fully accounted for in the preparation of hypothetical performance results and all of which can adversely affect actual trading results.

Virtual currency disclosure: Trading virtual currencies carries additional risk. View CFTC advisories as they contain more information on the risks associated with trading virtual currencies.

NinjaTrader® is a registered trademark of NinjaTrader Group, LLC. No NinjaTrader company has any affiliation with the owner, developer, or provider of the products or services described herein, or any interest, ownership or otherwise, in any such product or service, or endorses, recommends or approves any such product or service.

Kinetick® is a registered trademark of Kinetick, Inc. Market data services are provided by Kinetick, not by ZalorTrade.

Tradovate® is a registered trademark of Tradovate Holdings, LLC, a NinjaTrader company. ZalorTrade is not affiliated with Tradovate or NinjaTrader, is not a broker, introducing broker, or clearing firm, and does not provide brokerage, clearing, or execution services. Account terms, market data, and order execution are matters between you and your chosen provider.

All other broker, prop firm, and platform names and logos are the trademarks of their respective owners and are used for identification purposes only. Listing does not imply a partnership or endorsement in either direction.

ZalorTrade is a trade journaling and analytics tool. It is not a broker, futures commission merchant, exchange, market data vendor, or registered investment adviser, and it does not accept funds, route orders, or provide trading advice. See our full financial & risk disclaimer.

Stop guessing. Start journaling with an edge.

Turn scattered notes into a measurable, repeatable process. Start with a 7-day free trial and keep it only if it pays for itself.

Start free trialTalk to us