A trading CSV can look like a mess. Hundreds of rows containing timestamps, symbols, quantities, prices and P&L. But hidden inside those rows are answers to some of the most important questions about your trading.
What is a trading CSV?
CSV stands for comma-separated values. Many brokers and trading platforms allow you to export transaction or trade history as a CSV file. You can open it with spreadsheet software or import it into compatible analytics software.
What should your CSV contain?
Useful fields include entry and exit date and time, symbol, direction, quantity, entry price, exit price, fees and commission, and realized P&L. Once properly structured, this can be converted into meaningful statistics.
Start with basic metrics
Calculate total P&L, number of trades, winning and losing trades, win rate, average winner, average loser, largest win and loss, profit factor, expectancy, drawdown, and average holding time.
Add dimensions
Group trades by time of day, day of week, instrument, long vs short, trade duration, position size, and strategy. Instead of discovering you lost $2,000 you might find $3,400 of losses came from one specific type of trade. That is actionable information.
Be careful with the data
Broker exports are not always structured identically. A single trade may appear across multiple executions. Partial fills can create multiple rows. Fees may be separate. Deposits and withdrawals can sometimes appear in transaction exports. Do not blindly calculate statistics without understanding what each row represents.
Spreadsheet vs automated analysis
You can perform all of this using Excel or Google Sheets. For a few trades, that is perfectly reasonable. For hundreds or thousands of trades, calculations, grouping and charting become much more cumbersome. MyTraderScore uploads your trading history and turns raw data into performance metrics without building the spreadsheet yourself.