Alpha Ledger vs a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is the honest starting point. It is also the reason most journals are abandoned by week six.
Almost every trading journal starts as a spreadsheet, and that is the right place to start. It costs nothing, it bends to whatever you want to record, and building it forces you to decide what actually matters to you.
The trouble is not the spreadsheet. It is the typing. Every trade has to be entered by hand, at the end of a session when you are tired and the losing ones are the last thing you want to look at. Losing days get skipped. Then a week gets skipped. By the time you want to ask a real question of the data, the data has a hole in it exactly where the interesting behaviour was.
Alpha Ledger is built around removing that step. Trades arrive on their own, the maths is already done, and the only thing left for you to type is the part a computer genuinely cannot know: what you were thinking.
Side by side
The same jobs, done two ways
| What you are trying to do | Spreadsheets | Alpha Ledger |
|---|---|---|
| Getting trades in | Typed by hand, one row at a time, usually hours after the trade closed. | Broker sync every five minutes, or drop in a CSV from any broker and the columns are mapped for you. |
| Contract maths | Formulas you wrote yourself. A gold trade and a futures trade need different ones, and it is easy not to notice when one is wrong. | One engine covering forex pips, index points, gold ounces, futures ticks and crypto units, verified by unit tests. |
| Metrics | Whatever you have had time to build. Usually win rate, total P&L and a running balance. | 134 metrics computed continuously, each with its formula and what a good number looks like. |
| Finding patterns | Pivot tables, if you know how, and only for the questions you already thought to ask. | Patterns are surfaced without being asked for: the hour that costs you money, the setup that is quietly negative, the tag combination that works. |
| Screenshots | Pasted into cells where they break row heights, or kept in a folder that loses its link to the row. | Attached to the trade, annotated on the chart, and searchable. |
| Prop-firm rules | A manual drawdown column you update yourself, and hope you updated correctly. | Twenty-one rules checked continuously against the real programme, with a warning before you breach rather than after. |
| Asking a question | Write a formula. Get a number. Wonder whether the formula was right. | Ask in plain English. Every number in the answer comes from a query against your trades and cites the trades it came from. |
| Cost | Free, plus a few hours building it and a few minutes every trading day forever. | Free tier keeping your last 100 trades; Premium if you outgrow it. |
This page compares Alpha Ledger with a category of alternative, not with any named product. Claims about the alternative are ones that hold for the category generally; individual tools vary.
The other side
Where spreadsheets win
A comparison that concedes nothing is an advertisement. These are real advantages, and for some traders they are decisive.
It is genuinely free
No subscription, no trial ending. If cost is the binding constraint, a spreadsheet you actually fill in beats a subscription you cancel.
It does exactly what you tell it
Nothing is hidden behind someone else’s idea of what a metric should mean. If you want a strange column that only makes sense for your strategy, you can just add it.
You own the file
No account, no export step, no vendor. It opens in twenty years. We take data portability seriously for exactly this reason, which is why every Alpha Ledger export is plain CSV and JSON you can keep.
Building it teaches you something
Working out how to calculate expectancy yourself is a better education than reading the number off a card. If you have never done it, do it once.
Bringing a spreadsheet across
- 1Export your sheet as CSV. Any column order works.
- 2Drop it into the importer. Columns are matched automatically and you confirm the guesses.
- 3Anything ambiguous — a date format, a symbol the broker writes differently — is flagged before anything is saved.
- 4Duplicates are detected by a fingerprint of symbol, direction, size and times, so re-importing the same file twice is harmless.
Your notes column comes across as trade notes, and any column you were using as a category can be mapped to tags.
Questions
Try it against your own trades
Import a CSV and see what eleven months of your history says. Free tier, no card.