Why crypto trades are annoying to journal
Most journaling advice assumes one account, one currency, one instrument. Crypto breaks all three. You might buy spot BTC on Coinbase, scalp a perpetual on Bybit, and dollar-cost into ETH on Binance — three venues, three export formats, and a mix of spot and leveraged positions that behave nothing alike. Add the fact that the market never closes and prices quote in USDT rather than the dollars in your bank, and it's easy to end a month with no honest idea of what you actually made or lost.
The fix is not a fancier spreadsheet. It's getting every fill — from every exchange, spot and perps alike — into one journal, priced in one currency, so you can compare like with like. Here is the practical way to do that from the three exchanges most people use.
Binance: export your trade history or closed P&L
Binance keeps spot and futures in separate places, so you export twice. For spot, open Orders → Spot Order → Trade History and use the export button to download a CSV of your fills. For perpetuals, go to Orders → Futures Order → Trade History, or use the Transaction History export if you want realised P&L and funding fees in one file. Binance caps each export to a date range (historically around three months at a time), so for a full year you'll pull a few files and stack them.
A CSV is always better than a screenshot because it carries the exact fill price, quantity, fee and timestamp. But if you just want a quick start, a screenshot of the closed-P&L panel works too — more on that below. Either way, the goal is the same: journal your Binance trades in one place instead of squinting at the app.
Bybit: closed P&L is your friend
Bybit makes this easier than most. Under Orders → Derivatives → Closed P&L you get a clean, per-position record — entry price, exit price, size, realised P&L and fees — with an export to CSV. That closed-P&L view is genuinely the cleanest round-trip record any of the big exchanges hand you, so it's a good format to standardise on. For spot fills, check Order History under the spot section and export there. Once both are out, you can bring your Bybit history into one journal and stop reconciling two tabs by hand.
Coinbase: reports and the positions page
Coinbase's reporting lives under your account's Reports or Statements section, where you can generate a transaction or fills report as a CSV. Coinbase Advanced Trade has its own fills export. Coinbase is mostly spot for retail users, which actually keeps things simple: buys, sells, and the fee on each. Export the fills, and you can journal your Coinbase trades beside your perp activity from the other venues — the whole point being a single view, not three.
No CSV? A screenshot of the positions page works
Not every exchange gives a clean export for every product, and sometimes you just want to log a trade before you forget it. A screenshot of the positions or closed-P&L page is a perfectly valid input. As long as the image shows the symbol, direction, entry, exit, size and P&L, the numbers can be read off it and turned into journal entries.
This is how a lot of mobile-only traders log everything: close the position, screenshot the panel, drop it into the journal, done. The CSV is more precise for fees and funding, but the screenshot captures what matters for reviewing your own behaviour. You can import from a CSV or a screenshot the same way — the journal doesn't care which one you had to hand.
Get spot and perps into one journal, priced in dollars
Here is the part people skip. A 2% move on spot BTC and a 2% move on a 10× perp are completely different events for your account, and if your journal lists them side by side without flagging which is which, your win rate and your average loss both lie to you. Tag each trade as spot or perpetual, and record the P&L in dollars — convert USDT roughly 1:1 to USD if you like, just be consistent so every month is measured the same way. The difference between the two instruments deserves its own attention, which is why we wrote up spot vs perpetuals and the risk you cannot see.
With everything in one currency, the questions you actually care about become answerable: Is my spot book quietly funding my perp losses? Which venue costs me the most in fees? Do my 3am entries lose money — because the market being open at 3am doesn't mean you should be trading it. That last one has a familiar shape, and we covered it in revenge trading crypto.
A note on what a journal is for
To be clear: a journal analyses your own past trades. It doesn't predict prices, hand out signals, or promise returns — anyone offering that in crypto is selling something. What it does is turn a messy pile of fills from three exchanges into an honest, dollar-priced record of what you did and what it cost, so the next decision is made with data instead of a vague feeling.
This is exactly the job PnL Book does for crypto traders: pull your closed P&L from Binance, Bybit or Coinbase, or snap the positions page, and see spot and perps in one view, priced in dollars, with every tagged habit totalled. The same approach carries over if you also trade forex on MT4 or MT5 — one journal, one currency, every trade in front of you.