Import your history

CSV import is how you bring an existing trading history into Tradr. Export the trades from your broker, upload the file, map its columns to Tradr fields, preview the result, and commit.

What Tradr connects to

Tradr imports from a file you export from your broker. It does not hold your broker credentials and it does not place orders.

There is no direct broker connection today — no Interactive Brokers link, no live price feed, no OAuth to any brokerage. Tradr ships broker-specific column presets so a familiar export maps in one click, but the transport is always a file you supply. A direct read-only IBKR connection is planned; until it ships, CSV is the only import path, and this page will say so.

Before you start

Create an account first. An import needs somewhere to put the trades, and the importer will not proceed without one. See Accounts.

Imports are additive. They add positions and fills to the target account and never replace what is there, so importing the same file twice gives you the trades twice. There is no de-duplication.

Step 1 — Choose the target account

Open Import and pick the account under 1. Target account.

The first time you open this page

A one-off tip opens beside the Import trades from CSV heading, headed Bring your history in from a CSV. Choose Got it to dismiss it, or Read more to open this page. It does not come back.

The tip does not appear when your plan has no CSV imports left, because you could not act on it. See Plan limits.

Step 2 — Upload the file

Select Choose file and pick your export. The server parses and validates it on upload; nothing is written to your account yet.

The limits are 10 MB per file and 10,000 data rows. Split a larger export and import it in parts.

Step 3 — Map the columns

Tradr does not guess what your columns mean. Tell it, either by choosing a preset or by mapping each field by hand.

Presets pre-fill the mapping for a known export format — Interactive Brokers Flex Query trades, a generic one-row-per-fill layout, and formats used by common journalling tools. Choosing one fills the fields in; you can then adjust any of them. A preset is a starting point, not a lock.

Set these alongside the mapping:

Setting	What it controls
Row shape	Whether each row is one fill (Execution) or a whole round trip with entry and exit on one line (Round-trip). Set independently of the preset.
Timezone	The zone your export’s timestamps are written in. This is neither the account’s trading-day timezone nor your reporting timezone.
Date format	How to read the date column — ISO, US, and so on.
Number format	Whether 1,234.56 or 1.234,56.

For execution rows, these fields are required:

• Symbol
• Asset type
• Price
• Quantity
• Filled at (date/time)
• Exactly one of Type (entry/exit) or Action (buy/sell)

Preview import stays disabled until all of them are mapped, and the page lists what is still missing.

Asset type has to be a column

Every field maps to a column in your file. There is no “treat every row as a stock” option, so an export with no asset-type column cannot be mapped as it stands — including some formats Tradr ships a preset for.

Add the column before you upload. One value for every row is fine:

Symbol,AssetType,Action,Quantity,Price,FilledAt,Fees
AAPL,STK,BUY,100,181.50,2026-03-02T09:35:00,1.00

Step 4 — Read the preview

Select Preview import. Nothing has been written yet — this is the check.

The summary counts what Tradr found:

	Meaning
Rows parsed	Data rows read from the file
Rows valid	Rows that mapped cleanly
Rows with errors	Rows Tradr could not read. They are listed with their line numbers.
Positions	Positions these rows will become
Fills	Fills across those positions

Below the summary, each proposed position is shown with its fills and, when the rows close it, its proposed P&L.

How rows become positions

Fills are grouped by symbol and direction. A position runs from its first entry until the quantity returns to flat; the next fill after that starts a new position.

So four rows — buy 100 AAPL, sell 100 AAPL, buy 50 MSFT, sell 50 MSFT — become two closed positions, not one and not four.

Row numbers in the preview count the file’s lines, so the header is row 1 and the first trade is row 2. That matches what your spreadsheet shows.

Step 5 — Confirm

Select Confirm import.

Expected result: Added 2 positions and 4 fills to the target account., with a link through to them.

The realized P&L posts to the account balance at the same time. In the worked example above, a $25,000.00 account becomes $25,303.50 — plus $473.00 from AAPL, minus $169.50 from MSFT, both after fees.

A preview you do not confirm expires after 30 minutes.

If something is wrong afterwards

There is no “undo import”. Positions imported are ordinary positions: open one and fix a fill, or delete it. Deleting reverses its P&L out of the balance. See Log and manage positions.

For a bad import of any size, deleting position by position is the only path today. Preview carefully — that is what the step is for.

Troubleshooting

• Preview import stays greyed out — a required field is unmapped. The line above the button names which.
• Rows with errors is not zero — open the list. It gives the line number and what failed, usually a date that does not match the chosen date format.
• Every row failed on the date — the Date format or Timezone setting does not match the file.
• Quantities look wrong by a factor of a thousand — the Number format is reading 1,234 as 1.234 or the reverse.
• The P&L in the preview is not what you expect — check whether your export already nets fees out of the price. Tradr subtracts mapped fees itself, so fees counted twice show up here, before anything is written.

Related

• Log and manage positions — what an imported position looks like once it lands.
• Accounts & the multi-currency ledger — pick the account an import belongs to.