Journaling trades is simple. Keeping it up is the hard part.

The practical method: after every trade, record the setup, entry and exit, position size, P&L, the reason you took the trade, and one line on how it felt. Once a week, review the pattern — which setups win, which sessions hurt, whether you followed your rules. That review is where the value is; a journal without it is just a diary. Dusk Analyst stores all of this per trade and rolls it into analytics and weekly reports, and on the free tier you can log manually or import a CSV. Data is stored on Cloudflare, identity is handled by Auth0, billing by Stripe, and the AI that answers your insight questions runs on DeepSeek. No card is required for the free tier.

The best way is the one you actually keep doing. Three proven options: (1) a structured journal app with tags and analytics — fastest to review; (2) a spreadsheet with a fixed template — free but manual; (3) a notebook — works for a few trades, scales badly. What separates good journaling from busywork is the weekly review. Dusk Analyst makes the logging side automatic on Pro (MT4/MT5/cTrader auto-sync) and keeps the free tier for manual + CSV entry.

The essentials: date/time, symbol, direction, entry, exit, size, P&L, the setup or strategy tag, and a short note on why you took it. Optional but powerful: screenshots, emotions, whether you followed your plan. The point is to make review possible — seeing which setups produce your edge and where you leak. Dusk Analyst tracks all of it per trade and adds weekly reports and AI insights on top.

Journaling works best as a habit, not a project: log each trade when it closes (seconds if the entry is automated) and set aside 15-30 minutes weekly to review. The '1 hour/day reviewing trades' approach works for serious full-time traders but most people benefit from a consistent weekly review. If logging feels like a burden, that is a signal to automate the entry side — which is exactly what Dusk Analyst's MT4/MT5/cTrader auto-sync does.

Because manual logging is tedious and the payoff is delayed — most traders quit before the review starts paying. The fix is removing the friction: automatic entry (auto-sync), structured tags, and a weekly report that does the summarizing. Dusk Analyst is built around that: trades log themselves on Pro, the free tier covers manual + CSV, and the weekly report gives you the review without the spreadsheet work.

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 has a free trial of up to 30 days (card required). The pricing is deliberately simple: one plan, one price, no per-feature upsells.

Yes. Dusk Analyst Pro has a free trial of up to 30 days: 30 days if you start it within an hour of signing up, 15 days within 24 hours. A card is required to start it, nothing is charged on the day it starts, and when the trial ends Pro is $25/month unless you cancel. We email you a reminder before the trial ends. You can cancel anytime from Billing in the app; cancelling during the trial ends it straight away, nothing is charged, and your account goes back to the Free plan with every trade kept. There is one trial per account. The trial includes everything in Pro: MT4, MT5 and cTrader auto-sync, monthly reports, unlimited account books, 1,000 AI credits a month for AI Insights and CSV export. Start it in the app at app.duskanalyst.com, where it is offered whenever you open a Pro feature such as Connectors, and from the plan card in the sidebar. The Free plan is separate: it needs no card and stays free forever.

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 Pro's free trial (up to 30 days) includes the full monthly allowance.