Tradovate Trading Journal: Import Your Orders CSV and See Where You Make Money

How to export your Tradovate trades

These are the steps from the Tessera help centre, as of November 2026.

1. Open the Tradovate desktop or web platform.
2. Go to Accounts, select the account and open its settings (the gear icon).
3. Open the Orders tab.
4. Set the date range and run or refresh the list.
5. Click Download Report to export it as CSV.

Export from Orders, not a positions-only report. Keeping the platform language on English keeps the column headers stable.

For fees, export Cash History as a CSV from the same account reports area, for the same period. Tessera uses the fee rows (Exchange, Clearing, NFA and Commission). It does not use the "Trade Paired" profit and loss lines as the source of trade P&L.

Import the file into Tessera

1. Choose Tradovate, then CSV import.
2. Set the timezone to the IANA zone that matches the Fill Time column. That is usually your computer's local time zone while you were trading, for example America/Chicago or Europe/London.
3. Upload the Orders CSV and, if you have it, attach the Cash History CSV.
4. Import.

If chart times look wrong afterwards, re-import with the correct timezone. A wrong zone shifts every trade into the wrong session, which makes a session breakdown useless.

What Tessera reads from the file

• Filled rows only. Cancelled and rejected orders are skipped.
• Account. The Account column becomes the account code in Tessera, so one file can hold more than one account.
• Contract, side (B/S), fill price, quantity and Fill Time. Tessera pairs opposing buys and sells per account and contract on a first in, first out basis to build round trips.
• Fees, if you attach Cash History. Per-fill exchange, clearing, NFA and commission charges. Without it, the Orders CSV may not include commissions, and you can add or edit fees later.
• Asset class. Always futures on this import.

What you can analyse

Once the trades are in, they behave like any other account in Tessera:

• Core statistics: win rate, expectancy, profit factor, average win and loss, and drawdown, for the account or any filtered slice of it.
• Futures sessions. P&L by session, hour and weekday, so you can see whether the edge lives in the New York open, the London morning or the overnight Globex hours, and whether one session is quietly paying for another.
• Volatility and market regime. Each trade is labelled with the conditions at entry, using historical candles for the contract, so you can see whether the strategy needs movement or prefers quiet markets.
• MAE and MFE. How far price moved against and in favour of each trade, where candle data covers the contract and period, which is the input you need for setting stops and targets from evidence. See MAE and MFE analysis.
• Rule simulator. Replay the trades you already took on real candles with an entry filter, or a different stop, target or time exit, and compare the result before you change any code.
• Pine Script policies. If your strategy runs from TradingView, rules that hold up can be exported as Pine Script to re-backtest there.

If you trade a funded account, the session and weekday breakdowns are the quickest way to see which days would trip a daily loss limit. Our guide to prop firms that allow algo trading covers the rules themselves.

Limitations

• File import only. There is no Tradovate auto-sync. You export and upload again for new fills.
• Futures only. The Tradovate import treats every contract as futures.
• Fees need Cash History. The Orders CSV may omit commissions unless you attach Cash History or edit fees afterwards.
• Trading P&L only. Portfolio growth shows cumulative trading P&L, not your broker balance with deposits and withdrawals.
• Candle coverage. Regime, volatility and MAE/MFE labels depend on Tessera's historical candles for the contract. If too much history is missing for a period, a report says so rather than guessing.
• Plan. The Free plan imports the last 30 days of trades for one broker account into the trade log. Full history, statistics, reports and the simulator need a paid plan, from $39 a month. The free Entry Analysis report needs no paid plan.

Switching from TradeZella, TraderSync or Edgewonk

If you already journal Tradovate trades elsewhere, the export is the same Orders CSV, so you do not need to change anything at Tradovate. Export the period you want, upload it to Tessera and compare the two side by side for a few weeks.

The difference is what happens after import. Tessera is built for algo and systematic traders: it breaks results down by market condition and lets you test a rule change on the trades you already took, rather than focusing on manual tagging and screenshots. Our comparisons go into the detail: TradeZella alternative, TraderSync alternative and Edgewonk alternative.