TradeBench

What it is

A trade planner first and a journal second. Before you enter, you write a plan — entry, stop, target — and TradeBench sizes the position from three limits you set once: maximum risk per trade between entry and stop, maximum risk as a percentage of the account, and maximum capital in one position. It uses whichever is most conservative, against the current account value including open P&L. Checklists gate the entry, and some items tick themselves — a minimum average volume, for instance, is looked up for you.

Open trades sit on a dashboard with updated prices, what-if calculations and a TradingView chart. Closed trades become the journal: notes with pasted chart screenshots, labels for strategy, idea source and exit method, and reports on profit factor, win rate, average P&L, hold time, commissions and the equity curve, filterable by any of those labels. Paper-trade accounts run on the same risk settings, kept apart from real ones. TradeBench ApS, in Aarhus, Denmark, has run it since 2011.

Pricing

Free, with no paid tier to upsell to. The bargain is attention: you agree to click one or two sponsor links a month, shown at login or in at most one e-mail a month. The sponsors page names TradingView, through an affiliate link, and "various newsletter publishers".

Data & coverage

Stocks, futures, forex, crypto and CFDs on any exchange, with fractional shares. Options are not supported — the FAQ says so and points to workaround videos. The vendor says it carries live or delayed prices for most instruments; one it cannot look up can still be entered, and its P&L is then figured from your own entry price rather than a market price.

Integrations

TradingView supplies the charts on open trades, and screenshots paste straight from TradingView into a journal entry or plan without uploading a file. There is no broker connection: closed trades import only from TradeBench's own spreadsheet template, and export to Excel. Trades, plans and the journal can be shared by private link or published.

Limitations

• No options support at all, which rules it out for a large share of US retail traders.
• No broker import. History from a broker has to be reformatted into TradeBench's template, or typed in.
• The price is a monthly sponsor click, and the named sponsors include newsletter publishers — the one category of financial marketing a journal user is most likely to be better off without.
• Tested for screens of 1280×768 and up. Phones work but are not officially supported, and there is no app.
• Screenshots pasted into entries are not included in the export; they have to be saved one by one.

Alternatives

StonkJournal is the other free journal with no trade cap, and handles multi-leg options. TradeNote is free and self-hosted, with broker file import. Tradervue's free plan imports from a long broker list but stops at 30 trades a month. None of the three plans a trade or sizes it before entry the way TradeBench does.