Trading history: reviewing costs and exporting data

The essentials

History helps reconstruct trades and booked charges. Distinguish orders, deals, positions, deposits and withdrawals before summing. A deposit increases balance but is not profit; a partial close may create multiple rows.

Understand the mechanism, not just the definition

An order, execution and position need not share a history row. Orders can fill in parts and positions can close partially. Identify the export’s aggregation level and separate market activity from deposits, withdrawals and credits so that funding is not mistaken for strategy profit.

Example and verification

Select a period and keep a private report. Check ticket, date, symbol, size, result, commission and funding. Separate capital flows to evaluate returns. When exporting, verify decimal format, currency and columns before using a spreadsheet.

Worked case, step by step

USD 25 gross, −USD 3 commission and −USD 2 funding produce USD 20 net. A USD 100 deposit raises balance by USD 120, but only 20 is period trading result. Using balance change as return without separating cashflows wrongly credits trading with contributed funds.

What to verify when applying this

Compare each platform's ability to recover audit data. Publish only anonymized examples. A balance curve without separated deposits may mislead about returns or execution quality.

Practice: verify it in your environment

Learn by observing the process and keeping its data. Complete this practice in demo or using documentation, without sending real orders or adding capital for the exercise. Record differences between the example and your account specifications.

1. Export a demo period and keep the report timezone and currency.
2. Reconcile trades, charges and cashflows against starting and ending balances.

Test your understanding

Try the question before revealing the answer. Justify the conclusion and its assumptions rather than memorizing a number.