How to Import Tradovate and NinjaTrader Trades Into a Trading Journal
If you trade futures through Tradovate or NinjaTrader, whether on your own account or a TopStep-style evaluation, your journal is only as good as the way it reads your fills.
Profit AI Research · 6 min readTable of contents
Stock and MetaTrader exports usually give one row per trade with a profit column. Futures platforms are different: they record every order or execution. A scale-in and two partial exits produce four rows, and none of them has a P&L.
Why fills have to be paired
To turn fills into trades, the journal walks through them in time order per contract. A buy opens or adds to a long; a sell closes the oldest open contracts first (first in, first out). P&L for each closed portion is the price difference multiplied by quantity and the contract's point value. If the journal skips cancelled orders incorrectly or pairs across contracts, the numbers are wrong from the first row.
Exporting from Tradovate
- Open your account settings in Tradovate and go to the Orders report.
- Choose the date range and download the report as CSV.
- In Profit AI, choose Import a CSV. The Tradovate format is recognised, only filled orders are kept, and fills are paired into trades.
Exporting from NinjaTrader
In NinjaTrader, open the Trade Performance window (or the Executions tab of the Account Data window), filter to the account and dates you want, and export the executions grid to CSV. Profit AI recognises the Instrument and Action columns and pairs the executions the same way.
For TopStep and other futures evaluations
Evaluation accounts run on a trading platform, so you export from that platform. Profit AI does not connect to prop firm dashboards directly. After importing, set your evaluation's daily loss limit and maximum trades per day as playbook rules. Every day that broke them is flagged, and the Insights tab shows which hours and contracts cost you the most.
| Platform | How trades get in |
|---|---|
| Tradovate | CSV import (Orders report). Direct sync is not live yet. |
| NinjaTrader | CSV import (executions). |
| TradeStation | CSV import. |
| Interactive Brokers | Automatic sync via Flex Query. |
| cTrader (futures brokers) | Automatic sync. |
Frequently asked questions
About the author
Profit AI ResearchTrading Research TeamProfit AI Research is the in-house team behind the analyses, journal models, and Trader Score methodology used by 200,000+ traders. The team combines active discretionary traders, quantitative researchers, and ML engineers focused on price action, market structure, and prop-firm risk modeling.
More from Profit
