Why write this
Every trading journal advertises what it can see. This page is the other list — and we have an obvious reason to keep it accurate, because it constrains our own free tools exactly as much as anyone else's.
If a tool claims any of the things below from an uploaded file, it is estimating, fetching outside data, or inventing. Worth knowing before you trust a number.
Missing: the price you asked for
Your statement records the fill. The request is gone.
Everything that follows from that gap is therefore absent: slippage, whether it is symmetrical, how often you were requoted, and what the spread was at the instant your order hit the book. These are the costs described in slippage, and they are invisible to every file-reading tool that exists.
Missing: the path of the trade
A closed position gives entry, exit, and nothing between. So the file cannot tell you how far the trade went against you before it worked, or how much of the favourable move you left on the table — MAE and MFE.
Two trades with identical results and completely different risk look identical in an export.
Missing: the stop you originally set
This one deserves emphasis because it is the most consequential.
MetaTrader statements do carry a stop-loss column — which is rare and useful — but they carry the final value. Widen a stop mid-trade and get taken out at the new level, and the export shows a trade that respected its stop exactly.
Every discipline metric readable from a file, including our own discipline check, is blind to this. Moving a stop is the most common way a plan breaks, and it leaves no trace whatsoever in a closed statement.
Missing: why
No file records whether you followed your rules, whether a trade was your setup or boredom, whether you were tired, or whether the plan changed mid-position for a reason or from panic.
This is not a technical limitation to be solved later. It is the boundary between what a machine can observe and what only you know, and it is the reason a journal has a place for words at all.
Missing: partial context that changes numbers
Several smaller omissions that quietly distort statistics:
- Account currency is frequently absent, so any tool putting a dollar sign on your figures is guessing.
- Whether the P&L column is gross or net cannot be determined from the column itself, only from which other columns exist — see the cTrader case.
- Server timezone. MetaTrader timestamps are in the broker's server time, with no offset marker. "What hour do I trade worst" is answerable only relative to that server.
- Position size in comparable units. Lots, units and contracts across platforms are not directly comparable without instrument specifications the file does not include.
What a statement does contain, reliably
Worth stating the positive, because the list above is not an argument against using files:
- every closed trade, its instrument, direction and size
- entry and exit times and prices
- realised result, and costs where the broker itemises them
- the identifier that makes re-importing safe
- on MetaTrader, the stop and target as they stood at the end
That is enough for a great deal: how much you trade, when, how results cluster, whether your busy days are worse, how concentrated your losses are, whether your sample is large enough to mean anything. Every free analyzer on this site is built strictly from that list.
How to use this page
As a checklist against any journal, including this one. When a tool tells you something about your trading, ask which of its inputs came from the file.
If the answer is "slippage from your CSV", the number is invented. If it is "you followed your plan, based on your statement", the tool cannot know that — it knows the final stop matched the exit, which is a different sentence.