NinjaTrader
How to export your Trade Performance CSV
NinjaTrader 8 can hand you three different files from roughly the same place, and only one of them has a row per trade. Here is the one you want, the clicks to get it, and what the other two look like when you have exported them by mistake.
The export you want
You are after the Trades grid: one row per completed trade, with entry and exit prices, times, and the profit already net of commission and fees. Not raw fills, and not the totals.
- In the Control Center, choose New, then Trade Performance.
- Set the Display dropdown, top left, to Trades. This is the step that decides whether the file is usable, and it is the one most people miss.
- Choose your account and the date range you want to look at, then generate the report.
- Right-click anywhere in the grid and choose Export. Save it as CSV.
Nothing leaves your machine when you use the Lab. The Trade Lab reads the file in your browser and builds the debrief there. Your export is never uploaded, which is why you can drop a real account's history on it without thinking twice.
The two files people export by accident
Both come out of the same window, and both look plausible until you try to use them.
| What you exported | How to tell | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Performance summary | A short file of totals: gross profit, profit factor, number of trades. No individual trades in it. | Same window, set Display to Trades, export again. |
| Executions | Columns like Action, Price,
Time, and no profit column. These are raw fills, so
one trade may be several rows. |
Same window, set Display to Trades. Executions cannot be turned into trades afterwards without guessing how fills pair up. |
What a good file contains
Column names shift a little between NinjaTrader versions and grid layouts, which is fine. What matters is that these are present:
- Instrument, so sessions can be split by contract.
- Market pos. (or Position, or Side), giving long or short.
- Entry price and Exit price.
- Entry time and Exit time. Without these, trades cannot be put in order or grouped into sessions.
- Profit, which NinjaTrader reports net of every cost column in the file.
Fees live in up to five separate columns. Commission,
clearing fee, exchange fee, IP fee and NFA fee. Reading only
Commission and calling it your cost is a common way to
conclude you are losing 18 cents a trade to fees when the real figure
is several times that. Keep every cost column in the export.
Dates that come out ambiguous
If your regional settings write dates day-first, a file whose every
timestamp falls in the first twelve days of a month is genuinely
ambiguous: 05/03/2026 could be March or May, and nothing in
the file settles it. The honest fix is to make it unambiguous at the
source rather than let software guess, because guessing wrong reorders
your session and quietly stitches an equity curve across unrelated days.
Either re-export with a date format that includes an unambiguous month,
or convert the timestamp column to YYYY-MM-DD in a
spreadsheet before you use the file anywhere.
Then what
Drop the file on the Trade Lab and it builds the session debrief: expectancy, behaviour flags, execution grades, and an hour-by-hour breakdown of when your trading actually worked. It runs in your browser and nothing uploads.