NinjaTrader 8 Export Shows No Trades: Executions vs 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 two grids, and what each file looks like

The Executions export gives one row per fill, with an Instrument column and no Status column, because an execution is by definition a fill and there is nothing else it could be. Those rows get paired into round trips. The Trades export gives one row per completed trade with headers along the lines of Trade number, Instrument, Account, Strategy, Market pos., Qty, Entry price, Exit price, Entry time, Exit time. Either imports. Executions is the better file if you scale in and out, because it preserves each partial fill; Trades is simpler if you want NinjaTrader's own pairing rather than ours.

The direction column that broke everything

In the Trades grid, NinjaTrader names the direction column Market pos.. Nothing else in the industry calls it that, and it did not match any alias we had, so every row fell through to the default direction of long. That meant a file full of shorts imported as longs with the profit sign inverted: a stated loss of 51.90 stored as a gain of 50. This is the worst kind of import failure, because it does not fail. The numbers look plausible, the trade count is right, and nobody reports it. It is fixed, and there is now a check after every import that compares the profit we calculated against the profit your file states. When too many rows disagree, the import stops and asks you to compare a few trades before it will go through.

Afternoon trades landing twelve hours early

NinjaTrader writes times with an AM and PM marker. The web importer used to drop that marker, so 1:12:44 PM was stored as 01:12:44 and every afternoon fill landed twelve hours early. On a paired file that puts the exit before the entry, which the verification layer now catches and refuses. If you imported NT8 trades before this was fixed and your trade log shows afternoon sessions sitting in the small hours of the morning, delete those trades and import the file again. The parser reads the meridiem correctly now, including the midnight and midday edges that a naive twelve hour adjustment gets backwards.

Zero trades when the grid was empty of the window you picked

A NinjaTrader export that returns no rows at all is usually a date range problem rather than a format problem, and it has a common cause: you trade through a platform that is not NinjaTrader. If your executions actually happen on Rithmic, Sierra Chart, or your prop firm's own platform, the NT8 database has nothing in it for that period no matter how the grid is exported. Check whether the grid on screen shows the trades you are looking for before exporting. If it is empty there, the export cannot fix it, and the right file is the one from wherever your orders are actually placed.

After the import

NinjaTrader executions carry no commission column, so fees are estimated from a default rate until you set your real one. That default is well below what most prop firm sim accounts actually charge, which is the usual reason a journal shows more profit than the broker does. Set the real per contract rate on the account and re-cost the existing trades in one step. The commissions article covers what a round turn actually costs, and the export guide covers the click path if you have not exported yet.