Importing broker trades

Once a brokerage is connected, Tradion rebuilds your closed trades from your account history into the Broker Trades tab. You stop typing prices and times, and spend that effort on the part your broker cannot supply.

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How import runs

Import is automatic. There is no button you press and no date range you pick. Tradion pulls your account activity and rebuilds trades at three moments:

• When you first connect a brokerage.
• When you press refresh on a connection under Settings → Connected Brokerages.
• When your broker notifies Tradion that new activity has settled.

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What a transaction tape is, and why matching is needed

A transaction tape is the running list of individual fills your broker keeps for your account. Brokers do not store “trades” — they store a buy here, a sell there, each with a date, a price, a size, and a fee. A round trip you think of as one trade might be four rows on the tape. Tradion turns that list back into trades using FIFO, first in, first out.

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FIFO in plain English

Line your purchases of a symbol up in a queue, in the order you made them. A sale closes the oldest purchase at the front. If the sale is bigger, the leftover moves on to the next one. If the purchase is bigger, the remainder stays at the front for the next sale. It’s the rule most brokers and tax authorities use to work out cost basis — what a holding is treated as having cost you — so the trades Tradion rebuilds generally line up with your statement.

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Partial fills and scaled exits

Two things that break naive matching, and how FIFO handles them:

• A partial fill is one order your broker executes in several pieces at slightly different prices. It arrives as several transactions. FIFO stacks them in order, so the rebuilt entry price comes from the pieces your exit consumed.
• A scaled exit is closing a position in more than one sale — a third off here, a third there. Each sale eats forward through the queue, producing one closed trade per matched pair.

If a sale is larger than everything left in the queue, the excess is treated as opening a new position in the opposite direction, which is what it is. Only completed round trips appear. A position you still hold has no closing transaction to match against, so its gain or loss is still unrealised — on paper, not banked — and it lives in Portfolio instead.

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Options matching

Options are grouped by the full contract, not by the underlying ticker. The underlying, expiry, strike, and call-or-put all have to agree before two transactions can match, so a 450 call never pairs against a 460 call and this week’s expiry never matches next week’s. Profit and loss applies the contract multiplier: 100 shares per contract for standard options, 10 for mini options.

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Duplicates

Every rebuilt trade carries a fingerprint made from the identifiers of its opening and closing transactions, checked against your own account only. Re-syncing the same period does not create a second copy, a duplicate is reported as skipped rather than as an error, and a broker that later restates a price or a fee updates the existing trade instead of adding one. If you logged the trade by hand before it imported, you’ll have two records. Delete whichever you don’t want from the Trade Log tab.

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What import cannot recover

Your broker knows what you did. It does not know why. Import gives you accurate prices, sizes, and timestamps, and nothing at all about:

• What setup you thought you were taking.
• Where your stop was, and whether you moved it.
• Your position sizing decision — how large a position you took relative to what you were willing to lose — and what drove it.
• Whether you followed your plan.
• What state you were in.

Those are the fields a root-cause analysis is built from. Imported trades arrive with the plan-followed flag unset, because nobody has answered the question yet. So import is half the job. The other half is a minute of typing.

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When nothing shows up