Profit and loss, good and bad luck, elation and depression lie very close beneath each other in online Forex trading. Who has made a profit of $1,000 yesterday may lose twice as much with today’s trades.
And in practice it is so that the vast majority of the traders lose money with Forex trading. In addition to this, due to the number of trades, maybe even with different Forex brokers, one might quickly lose the overview of his own success as an online FX trader. We therefore advise all traders to keep at least some basic accounting records about their gains and losses with Forex trades.
We provide you with two versions for accounting as a Forex trader. In between many variations are conceivable. It is up to you to decide how detailed you want to track your FX trading gains and losses in a statistic. But we advise you to choose at least the variant “Mini”.
Forex Accounting Version “Mini”
If you have no overview of all your previous profits or losses in Forex trading, then the option “Mini” is a good, simple and pragmatic solution. You do not have to manually enter the individual transactions, you just keep track of your success on an excel spreadsheet at regular intervals. We recommend that you do this at least monthly. You write down the account balances manually in a row in an Excel sheet. Use the following columns:
Deposits: Enter the monthly deposits from your bank account (credit card, Moneybookers, Paypal etc) to your Forex broker account here.
Withdrawals: Here you enter the monthly cash outs of profits to your bank account or to your online ewallet provider.
Broker: Enter your account balance per broker. If you trade with several Forex brokers, then you create a column for each broker.
The Excel spreadsheet for the simple Forex trading account in the variant “Mini” could look as follows:
If you like this version “Mini”, then you can download the Excel spreadsheet Forex accounts here for free.
Note: You only need to change the blue numbers – the other figures are calculated automatically. If you want to track your monthly profits and losses with the above Excel spreadsheet, then you have just to enter four numbers per month.
Forex accounts Version “Maxi”
In contrast to the minimalist version of from above, you can track all of your transactions. You can write down every detail of every single trade you make, covering for example:
- Date
- Forex Broker
- Currency pair
- Buy / Sell
- Price
- Profit / loss on the transaction (in pips and well as an absolute dollar figures)
- Holding period
- …
Unfortunately, we don’t know any free FX trading accounting software. Even if you can look-up your profits and losses at your Forex broker, we suggest that you store at least some basic records on your own computer. This is the only way to keep an overview of your trading history and your success as a FX trader in the long run. Otherwise, you might quickly forget about past trades with brokers that you do not use for online trading anymore.