The Easy Journal, explained.

What the Easy Journal is

The Easy Journal is a Windows desktop app that tracks your futures trading across every prop firm and account you use. It does three things well:

• It records the truth. Every fill, balance and position from NinjaTrader is captured automatically into a local database on your machine — no cloud, nothing that can lock you out of your own history.
• It shows where you stand. The Home view tells you at a glance whether you're up or down across all accounts, what you've spent on evaluations, and how close any account is to a drawdown breach.
• It keeps you on the right side of the rules. You enter each firm's rules (drawdown, daily loss, targets, min days) and it computes your current floor and target, so you always know how much room you have left.

It's built for one trader running multiple prop-firm accounts — not a multi-user system, broker tool, or backtester. It's the record of what your live trading actually did.

How the pieces fit

Three pieces work together, in a one-way pipeline — nothing flows back to NinjaTrader or your broker:

• NinjaTrader 8 connects to your brokers, routes orders, and tracks each account's balance and fills. It's the source of truth for what's happening right now.
• The Bridge add-on runs inside NinjaTrader. On a schedule (or when you click SYNC), it captures every account's state and recent fills and writes them as JSON files to disk. It only reads and writes files — it never sends orders.
• The Easy Journal sits outside NinjaTrader. On SYNC it copies the Bridge's files, parses them, and updates its database — then shows you the new picture.

What you'll need

• A Windows machine (NinjaTrader is Windows-only).
• NinjaTrader 8 with at least one prop-firm broker connection working.

• Your Easy Journal installer (an .exe) and the Bridge add-on (a .zip) — both arrive with your licence email.
• Your licence key from the same email.

Install the Bridge in NinjaTrader

The Bridge ships as a NinjaScript add-on .zip file. You import it — don't unzip it:

1. Save the Bridge .zip from your licence email somewhere easy to find (Downloads is fine). Leave it zipped.
2. Open NinjaTrader 8's Control Center.
3. Go to Tools → Import → NinjaScript Add-On...
4. Browse to the Bridge .zip, select it, and click Open.
5. NinjaTrader imports it and confirms — if it asks to restart, restart NinjaTrader.
6. A TAH Bridge item now appears under the New menu.

Open it with New → TAH Bridge. It starts inactive; you enable it by setting an output folder and turning the schedule on (see the Bridge).

Install the Journal

The Journal installs like any Windows app, from the installer .exe in your licence email:

1. Double-click the Easy Journal installer (.exe).
2. If Windows shows a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen, click More info → Run anyway — that's Windows being cautious about new software, not a problem with the app.
3. Follow the installer's prompts (the default install location is fine).
4. When it finishes, launch Easy Journal from the Start menu or desktop shortcut.
5. On first run the activation window appears: paste your licence key (copy the whole thing, dashes and all) and click Activate.

First launch creates your local database — every trade, account and setting lives on your machine, not in a cloud. Reinstalling or updating later keeps your data; the database carries forward automatically.

First-run setup

On first launch the Home view is mostly empty — the Journal doesn't know your accounts yet. Two ways to populate it:

Option A — let SYNC discover your accounts (recommended)

1. Configure the Bridge and run a sync inside NinjaTrader (see the Bridge).
2. Click SYNC in the Journal. Every account NinjaTrader knows about appears, marked stage Unknown.
3. Classify each one (Eval, Funded, etc.) and fill in any rule fields the snapshot couldn't determine.

Option B — add accounts manually

On the Accounts view click + Add Account and enter the account name (must match NinjaTrader exactly), the firm, the starting balance and the drawdown rules. The next sync ties your manual entry to the live Bridge data. Most people use Option A first, and Option B only for slave or simulator accounts that don't match automatically.

The Home view

What you see first — a quick read on whether you're up or down and what needs attention. Five regions, top to bottom:

• Net P&L — earned minus spent across every real (non-sim) account, lifetime. Green when positive, red when negative.
• Spent / Earned / ROI — total costs (eval fees, resets, seats) in red; actual cash withdrawn in green; and ROI = (Earned − Spent) / Spent. Negative ROI is normal for the first few months.
• Account stages — a donut of your accounts by stage: Funded, Eval, EvalPass, Breached, Retired, Unknown. The centre shows the active count (everything except Retired).
• Spend by firm — a bar chart of where your costs go, biggest first.
• Calendar — daily P&L tinted on each cell (green profit / red loss), with dots for high-impact news and a marker for earnings. Click any day for the day-detail modal (P&L breakdown, earnings, news).
• Alerts — things needing attention (new accounts detected, breached accounts), or "All clear."

Managing accounts

The Accounts view is the master table of every account — firm, name, stage, lifetime cost, P&L, withdrawn, ROI, active days and trade count. Row colours follow the stage. Filter with the pills (All / Eval / Funded / Breached / Retired) and sort by clicking any column header.

Add an account

Click + Add Account. The modal has three sections:

• Identity — the account name (must match NinjaTrader exactly), an optional friendly Display name, and the Firm (used for spend grouping).
• Prop firm rules — starting balance, profit target, drawdown amount, drawdown type (Static / EOD / Trailing), daily loss limit, min trading days, consistency %. Leave blank what doesn't apply. Manual wins: anything you type stays; the Bridge only fills blanks.
• Lifecycle — the starting stage, and an optional "Linked eval account" so a funded account inherits its eval cost.

Costs & withdrawals

Use + Add Cost for anything you paid (eval fees, resets, monthly seats) and + Add Withdrawal for payouts you actually received. Costs feed "Spent," withdrawals feed "Earned." You can't enter a future-dated cost or withdrawal.

Edit & change stage

Double-click (or right-click → Edit) a row to edit it — the edit modal adds a Refresh from Bridge button to re-pull rules. Stage changes are manual: right-click → Change stage (the Journal never auto-marks an account Breached). Each transition is recorded in the account's history.

Account detail & the drawdown floor

Click any account to open its detail view (Trading and Journal tabs).

Trading tab

Four tiles (Net P&L, Trades, Win rate, Min balance), a per-account daily P&L calendar, a statistics card (profit factor, avg win/loss, R:R, expectancy, max losing streak, max drawdown, best/worst day), optional strategy stats, and the full trades table (entry/exit, instrument, side, qty, prices, P&L, commission, strategy).

What "Min balance" means

The floor below which the account breaches — it depends on the drawdown type:

• Static — starting balance − drawdown, fixed forever.
• EOD — re-anchors each day to the prior day's closing balance minus the drawdown (day 1 falls back to starting balance).
• Trailing — anchors to the all-time peak balance minus the drawdown; goes up, never down. The peak comes from the highest balance the Journal has recorded for the account.

Hover the Min balance tile to see how the floor was calculated.

Reports

The cross-account analytics view. A row of time-range pills (30D / 3M / 6M / 1Y / All) filters everything on the page. Below that:

• Monthly trend — net P&L per month, green above / red below the zero line.
• Strategy performance — a sortable table (trades, net P&L, win rate, profit factor, avg R:R, expectancy) plus a comparison bar chart with a metric picker. Sim accounts are excluded; unattributed fills show as (unsigned).
• Per-firm breakdowns — one card per firm (accounts, spent, earned, funded/eval/breached counts, ROI).
• All-firms summary — a lifetime rollup of everything.

Settings

Open Settings from the sidebar. Changes save automatically when you click out of a field — there's no Save button. Cards:

• Bridge — the Bridge folder (must exactly match the Bridge's output folder in NinjaTrader) and the Cache folder (the Journal's working copy, normally C:\EasyJournal\BridgeCache\). Also shows last sync time.
• Calendar — toggle the economic-news layer, pick currencies (default USD), impacts (default High + Holiday), display timezone (default Chicago), refresh policy (Auto/Manual), and tray notifications with lead times.
• Earnings — toggle the earnings layer and enter a free Finnhub API key (sign up at finnhub.io). Default watched symbols: SPY, QQQ, AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, AMZN, GOOG, META, TSLA.
• Database — Live (your real data) vs Demo (sample data for showing the app to someone without exposing your numbers). Switching modes needs a restart.
• About — Journal / schema / expected Bridge version, a changelog link, and a button to open the data folder (for backing up journal.db).

The Bridge

What the Bridge does

It watches every account NinjaTrader knows about, captures every fill, and writes a snapshot JSON (accounts + fills since last sync + meta) to the output folder on a schedule.

Configure it

Open New → TAH Bridge. Three sections:

• Status — active/inactive, last sync, accounts and fills seen.
• Schedule — Sync on startup and/or Periodic sync every N minutes (default 60). You can also click Sync now.
• Output — where snapshots are written (default the NinjaTrader Bridge folder; set it to a network drive like T:\ if the Journal runs on another machine/VPS).

Troubleshooting

SYNC does nothing

• Check Settings → Bridge → Bridge folder matches what the Bridge writes to.
• Check the Bridge is Active (NinjaTrader → New → TAH Bridge) with a recent last-sync; if not, toggle the schedule on or click Sync now.
• Open the Bridge folder — you should see recent Bridge_Snapshot_<timestamp>.json files.

The Home view shows enormous losses

Usually NinjaTrader was restarted mid-day and an old Bridge wrote $0 balances before brokers reconnected. Fix: use Bridge v0.10.2+ going forward; for existing bad data, back up journal.db first, then remove the zero-state rows. (Advanced — we can do this with you; reach out via the contact form.)

An account in NinjaTrader isn't in the Journal

• The Bridge hasn't synced since you added it — force a sync, then click SYNC.
• The name doesn't match exactly (different case/dashes) — delete the manual one and let SYNC pick up the real one.
• It's auto-flagged as a simulator (name starts with Sim/Practice/Demo/Backtest/Playback) — edit the row and uncheck "is simulator" to track it.

The drawdown floor looks wrong

Check the drawdown type (Static/EOD/Trailing produce very different floors), confirm the starting balance isn't 0, and for Trailing accounts hover the Min balance tile to check how the peak was determined.

News events aren't showing

Check the news feed is enabled and review your currency and impact filters in Settings → Calendar (the default is USD with High and Holiday impacts only). If the refresh policy is set to Manual, click refresh; otherwise the calendar shows the last cached fetch.

Guides & how-tos (step by step, with pictures)

Every walkthrough below uses real screenshots from the Journal — the same guides included with the app.

FAQ

Where is my data stored?

Locally, in journal.db on your machine — there's no cloud and nothing that can lock you out of your history. Back it up via Settings → About → open data folder.

How do I get help?

Use the contact form or the channels on the contact page.