Ploutos Help

Importing Trades

Usually the fastest honest test of Ploutos if you already have history and want real trades in today.

If you already have history, CSV import is usually the fastest honest test of Ploutos. It gets real trades into the journal without forcing you to sort out live sync first.

Ploutos accepts two CSV shapes and auto-detects which one you uploaded:

  • Closed trades — one row per round-trip. Has an entry, an exit, and a P&L.
  • Executions / fills — one row per fill. Each Buy is paired with a later Sell during import to form a closed trade. This is what most broker exports look like.

You do not pick which shape. The importer reads your headers and a sample of rows, decides, and shows you the result. If the detection is wrong, you can override the column mapping in Review mapping.

Formats Ploutos is designed to recognize

The importer is intentionally broker-flexible. It recognizes common headers from exports shaped like NinjaTrader executions, Tradovate fills, TradeStation filled orders and trade reports, MetaTrader 5 deal history, Sierra Chart trade activity, cTrader history, Interactive Brokers Flex-style execution files, and generic journal CSVs.

Exact column names do not need to match Ploutos. Headers such as Instrument, Contract, Symbol, Date/Time, Opening time, Closing time, Buy/Sell, Action, Type, Volume, Qty Filled, Entry price, Exit price, Realized P/L, Net (USD), Commission, Order ID, and Deal are normalized during detection.

If your broker includes account/report title rows before the actual header, Ploutos skips those and starts at the first row that looks like a trade header.

For CME, CBOT, NYMEX, and COMEX futures exports without an explicit timezone, Ploutos treats timestamps as market time. If a file includes an offset such as +0100 or Z, that offset is used instead.

Before you import anything

Check three things:

  • you are in the correct Ploutos account
  • the file is the export you actually mean to use
  • you are willing to stop if the preview looks wrong

The biggest import mistake is not bad CSV formatting. It is importing the right file into the wrong workspace.

The import path

  1. Click Import CSV.
  2. Choose the file.
  3. Let Ploutos analyze it.
  4. Read the preview like it matters.
  5. Import only if the rows look believable.

That preview step is the whole point. A file loading successfully is not the same thing as the mapping being right.

Large CSV files

You do not need to split large CSVs by hand.

After detection, Ploutos breaks large files into smaller uploads and keeps the same source label across every chunk. The import modal shows progress such as Imported 2 of 5 chunks while the file is landing.

If one chunk fails, the chunks that already finished stay saved. Click retry and Ploutos continues from the failed chunk instead of starting the whole file over.

What a believable preview looks like

Pick a few rows you remember and check:

  • the market or symbol looks right (e.g. ESM6, MNQ, NQM6)
  • the timestamp is in the right ballpark for when you traded
  • the price is not obviously shifted (not 10x off, not the wrong instrument's price)
  • the side is right — your buys are Long and your sells are Short
  • the P&L sign is correct — winning trades show as positive P&L, losing trades as negative

That last point is the one that catches most bad imports. Some broker CSVs put losses as a positive number in a separate "loss" column, or use a non-standard sign convention. If a trade you remember as a winner is showing red in the preview (or vice versa), the importer mapped the wrong column to P&L. Fix it in Review mapping before clicking import.

For executions / fills exports there is no P&L on individual rows — that gets calculated when Buys and Sells are paired into closed trades. The preview will show 0.00 per fill in that case, which is normal.

If you mostly trade something like NQ intraday, you should be able to tell in seconds whether the preview feels real or nonsense.

If the market is unfamiliar, Ploutos may keep it as a custom market. That is fine for review, but chart previews and point-value behavior are strongest when the market resolves to a supported symbol.

What happens after import

Once you confirm, the trades land in the selected workspace and become part of the journal. From there, the useful part starts:

  • grouped trades become reviewable
  • filters start meaning something
  • notes, tags, strategy, and review state can be cleaned up properly

Import is not the goal. It is the fastest way to reach the actual review workflow.

Duplicate protection is automatic

You do not need to worry about importing the same file twice.

Ploutos fingerprints every row by time, side, quantity, price, P&L, commission, account, and instrument before the import lands in the journal. If a row matches one already in your trades, it is skipped silently and the import summary tells you how many were skipped:

Skipped 12 duplicate rows already present in Journal.

That means it is safe to:

  • re-upload the same file without thinking
  • import overlapping date ranges from the same broker
  • re-import after a failed first attempt

The only way you can end up with real duplicates is if the same trade appears in two exports with different timestamps, prices, or quantities — at which point Ploutos has no way to know they are the same trade.

Common ways to waste time here

The preview already looks wrong, but you import anyway

Do not do that.

If times, prices, sides, or P&L signs look off in the preview, the journal is not going to magically repair the source file later. Either:

  • open Review mapping and re-map the columns yourself, or
  • fix the export at the broker side and re-upload.

The import succeeded, but the journal still feels off

Open Journal -> Trades and look at the raw rows first.

If those rows already look wrong, the issue is almost always the source file or the mapping, not the dashboard.

You exported the wrong shape

A "trades" export that contains one row per fill is actually a fills export. A "fills" export where each row already has both an entry and exit price is actually a closed-trades export. Trust what is in the file, not what the broker called the export.

The detection card (top right of the import modal) tells you which shape the importer picked. If that disagrees with what you expected, that is the first thing to investigate.

A good first test

If you are still deciding whether Ploutos is worth using:

  1. import one recent CSV
  2. open a few grouped trades
  3. tag or review a handful of them

That tells you much more than staring at an empty dashboard or setting up live sync too early.

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