[Vuejs]-How to read with VueJs result from MongoDB

Your code looks perfectly fine. A reduced example seems to work and I could not find a critical difference to your code: https://codepen.io/tuelsch/pen/XRXvZy

Allthough, you may want to consider to transfer your template markup into a separate tempalte. Your code would look like this:

<div id="app"></div>

<template id="list">
    <ul class="collection">
        <li v-for="item in items" class="collection-item avatar" :key="item._id">
          <span class="title">{{ item.pair }}</span>
          <p>{{ item.openDate }} <br>
             {{ item.direction}}
          </p>
          <a href="/list/{{ item._id }}" class="secondary-content"><i class="material-icons">send</i></a>
        </li>    
    </ul>
</template>

<script type="text/javascript">
    var app = new Vue({
      el: '#app',
      template: '#list',
      data: {
        items: []
      },
      mounted: function() {
        var that = this;
        axios.get('/api/journal')
            .then(function(response) {
                if(response.status = 200) {
                    that.items = response.data;                     
                    console.log(that.items);
                } else {
                    console.log('error');
                }
            })
            .catch(function(error) {
                console.log(error);
            });
      },
      methods: {

      }   
    })
</script>