Why Your Broker Statement Will Never Import as Trades

Aurafy is a young, independent trading journal. It earns trust by keeping the local app usable without an account, making desktop data exportable, and being clear about which features are free and which require Pro.

Page updated September 2026

The structural difference

A CSV file has exactly one header row, the first line, and every line after it is data. A statement breaks that rule immediately by putting the broker name, the account number and a date range above the table. The importer reads the first line as the column names and gets the broker's name, so every column is junk and nothing lines up. This is not a fixable formatting quirk in general, because the number of lines above the table, and whether there is more than one table, varies by broker and by report. Where we know a specific report's layout, as with the MetaTrader 5 history report, it is handled. Where we do not, the file is refused rather than guessed at.

PDFs cannot be imported, and that is not a limitation worth fixing

A PDF has no columns at all. It has text positioned on a page, and whether it looks like a table is a matter of where the words happen to sit. Extracting trades from that is guesswork, and guesswork applied to your entry prices is not a feature. Nearly every platform that produces a PDF statement also produces a CSV of the same data on the same page, usually behind a smaller button next to it. That is the file to take. If your broker genuinely offers no CSV anywhere, typing your trades in by hand is more reliable than any extraction, and for the trade counts most discretionary traders run it takes a few minutes.

Screenshots, and what to do with them instead

A chart screenshot shows the price. It does not show your entry, your exit or your size, which are three of the six things a trade is made of, so there is nothing in the picture to import. This is common enough that the importer detects it and says so directly rather than reporting an empty file. The screenshot is still worth keeping though. Type the trade in by hand, which takes about a minute, and attach the image to it. The chart then sits next to the numbers, which is what you actually wanted from the screenshot, and the trade is in your statistics where it belongs.

The other files people upload by mistake

Three more show up regularly and none is a trade history. A support ticket log, with columns like client_time_utc, account, ticket_id, message, event_type, which is a record of conversations with your prop firm. A balance history, which records what your money did rather than what you traded. And a text dump of the trading screen, which carries the price ladder and the platform's own menus but not a single completed trade. Each of these opens cleanly, looks like data, and contains nothing importable. The exit price test at the top of the main troubleshooting page catches all three in seconds.

What to ask your broker for

The wording that gets you the right file is trade history export or order history export, as a CSV. Avoid the words statement and report, which almost always produce the human readable document. On most platforms the correct export lives on the trade history screen itself rather than in a reports or documents section, and it is often the less prominent of the two buttons there. If you get a choice of date range, take the whole account history: there is no cost to importing more, and a journal built on a partial history gives you statistics that are quietly wrong rather than obviously missing.