The Topstep journal for Combine & Funded.

No — GridTrade is a journal, not a risk-management gateway sitting between you and TSTrader or whichever platform you run. The actual daily loss limit is enforced by Topstep's own software, which will close your positions and lock the account the moment you breach it. What the journal gives you is visibility: the calendar view shows each day's PnL as a colored box, so you can monitor your distance to the limit and review how often you drift close to it. That pattern is worth studying. Most traders don't blow a daily loss limit on one clean trade — they get there through revenge entries and size creep after a loss, usually with emotion tags climbing toward 4 or 5. Reviewing red days against those tags shows you the behavior before it costs you the account. The daily loss limit and trailing drawdown end most Topstep accounts, so building awareness around them is the whole point.

Yes — GridTrade is platform-agnostic and manual-entry by design, so it works alongside any execution platform Topstep supports, including TSTrader, Sierra Chart, and NinjaTrader. There's no broker connection to configure and nothing to break when a platform updates. The manual entry is a feature, not a limitation: the 60 seconds you spend logging each trade — entry, exit, size, R-multiple, and an emotion tag — is the journaling habit itself. Traders who auto-import everything tend to skim past their own mistakes, because the log fills itself and nobody actually looks at it. Typing it in forces a small moment of honest review right when it matters most, just after the trade. Everything lands on the same calendar and feeds the same stats regardless of where you executed, so a day split across two platforms still reads as one clean record. CSV and statement import is on the roadmap for people who want to backfill their history faster.

Yes. Topstep's consistency rule is about how evenly your profit is spread — a single monster day can't make up too large a share of your total, or the profit is held back. The calendar view and daily-PnL distribution make that visible at a glance: you can immediately see whether your gains come from many steady green days or one or two outliers carrying everything. That's essentially the same data Topstep uses to judge consistency, so seeing it in your own journal helps you understand your pattern before you risk a violation. If one day is doing all the work, you know to keep grinding smaller, repeatable days rather than swinging for another hero trade. Pair the distribution with your emotion tags and R-multiple and you start to see which setups produce that steady, rule-friendly profit curve. Consistency isn't luck — it's a pattern you can watch build day by day and correct early, well before it threatens a payout.

Yes — just add a separate account for each firm and keep them side by side. Every prop program has its own quirks: FTMO runs a different drawdown and profit-target structure, Apex has its own trailing threshold and consistency expectations, and Topstep sits somewhere else again on daily loss limit and payout rules. Keeping each in its own account means the stats, calendar, and R-multiple never bleed together, and you can see honestly which firm's ruleset actually fits how you trade. Many traders discover they're consistently profitable under one structure and repeatedly tripped up by another — and that's a decision the numbers should make, not your gut. The emotion and consistency data carries across all of them, so the habits you build for Topstep transfer straight over to the rest. See also: FTMO journal, Apex journal, funded-account journal.