Your Trading CSV Imported Nothing. Here Is Why.

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 ten second check

Open the file in any text editor, or in a spreadsheet, and read the first line. That line is the column names, and it decides everything. You are looking for a column holding the price you got OUT at, named something like Exit price, Close price, Sell price, or a stated Profit. If nothing on that line refers to closing or profit, the file records something other than finished trades, and no importer anywhere will produce trades from it. That single check separates the fixable from the hopeless faster than any error message.

The six files that cannot become trades

Open positions. Has a column with the word unrealized in it. A position still open has no exit yet, so there is nothing finished to journal. Balance history. Has Balance before and Balance after. It records what your money did, not what you traded. An order list with no fill prices. Has a Status column and an empty Avg fill price on the rows that actually moved size. It says what you asked for, never what you paid. A printed statement. Opens with the broker name on the first line, so every column name reads as junk. A PDF. Same problem, with no columns at all. A screenshot. Shows the price but not your entry, exit or size, so there is nothing in it to read.

What people actually upload, counted

Of the failed uploads sitting in our quarantine table, most are files that parse perfectly well and simply hold no closed trades: an open positions list, a balance history, an account snapshot, an order list without fill prices. The next group along is the platform report with a title line above the real table. Genuine parser gaps, where the file held real trades and we could not read them, are the smaller share, and every one found so far has since been fixed. If your import came back empty, the odds strongly favour the export being wrong rather than the file being unreadable.

Find your platform

The specific fix depends on which platform wrote the file, because each one names its exports differently and each one has a different trap. TradeLocker offers three exports that look nearly identical and only one of them holds closed trades. MetaTrader 4 and 5 write a report with three different tables stacked inside one file. NinjaTrader 8 has two grids that both export and only one carries entry and exit on the same row. Tradovate has four downloads under Reports and one of them is an account snapshot with no trades in it at all. If your platform is not listed, the statement versus trade history page covers the general case.

Why an empty import used to say nothing useful

For a long time this failure produced one line: no trades found in this file. That is technically true and practically useless, because it describes our result rather than your file, and it reads like a broken product. The importer now names what it received instead. Upload an open positions export and it says so, and tells you to take the order history. Upload a picture and it says a picture has no trade records in it, and offers to attach the screenshot to a trade you type in by hand. It refuses to guess: on a file it does not recognise it says nothing rather than inventing a reason, because a confident wrong diagnosis costs you more time than no diagnosis at all.

A wrong import is worse than a failed one

The failures worth worrying about are the ones that succeed. A file whose direction column we cannot read imports every short as a long, and the P&L sign flips with it, so the numbers look plausible and nobody reports it for weeks. Aurafy now checks its own work after every import: it compares the profit it calculated against the profit your file states, and checks that no exit lands before its entry. If more than a quarter of the checkable trades disagree, the import is held: the confirm button is disabled until you have compared a few trades yourself and ticked to say so, and your original file is kept and flagged either way. It is the one part of an importer that is worth more than the parser itself.