Why the threshold has to be yours
Most writing on this subject eventually names a number. More than five trades a day, more than ten, more than three per session. Those numbers are worthless, because they are answering a question that has no general answer.
For a scalper on the one-minute chart, five trades is a slow morning. For someone trading daily closes, five trades is a good month. A threshold that means "too many" for one of them means "barely started" for the other.
So this page does not bring a number. It takes the median of your own trading days — the count that sits exactly in the middle of your history — and treats anything above it as a busy day. Half your days fall on each side by construction, which is the only definition of "busy for you" that survives contact with a different trading style.
What it measures
Every closed trade in your file is assigned to the day it closed, because that is when its result exists. Then each day carries three things: how many trades it held, what it made or lost after commission and swap, and what those costs came to.
The net part matters more here than on most pages. Commission is not a footnote to overtrading — it is the mechanism. A day with twenty trades pays twenty spreads and twenty commissions whether or not the trades were any good, and a gross figure hides exactly the cost the page is meant to measure.
From there:
day result = gross P&L − commission − swap
busy days = days at or above (median + 1) trades
calm days = the rest
gap = average busy day − average calm day
carried = gap × number of busy days
That last line is the headline figure. It is not a projection or a model — it is the difference between two averages you already produced, multiplied by how often you produced the higher-volume one.
The honest caveat, stated up front
This measures whether your busy days went worse. It does not measure why, and the direction is genuinely not in the file.
Two completely different traders produce an identical pattern:
- The one who trades more and, as a result, trades worse.
- The one who loses early and then keeps clicking to get it back.
In the first, volume causes the loss. In the second, the loss causes the volume. The statement records only that both happened on the same day. Any tool that reads a statement and tells you which one you are is guessing, and this one will not.
What the number does give you is a size. If the gap is small, the thing you are worried about is not your biggest problem and you can stop paying attention to it. If it is large, you now know the amount rather than the adjective.
Why the figure is sometimes withheld
If either side of the split has fewer than eight days, the headline number is not shown at all.
An average taken from three days does not describe how you trade — it describes which three days happened to land in the export. Showing it anyway would be the same failure as any tool that prints a confident figure from a sample too thin to support one. The distribution table still appears, because counting what is in the file is always honest; averaging it is not always.
What happens to your file
It is read inside the browser tab, by the same parsers the app uses for MT4, MT5, cTrader, IBKR, Schwab, Trading 212, Tradovate, KuCoin and Coinbase statements, plus a general CSV reader for everything else. There is no upload, no account, and no server in the path — the page has no server to send it to.
The one thing that needs the app is column mapping. If no parser recognises your file's columns, this page tells you so and stops, rather than guessing what your columns mean.
Frequently asked
How many trades a day is too many?
There is no general answer, and any page that gives you one is guessing about your strategy. The useful version of the question is whether your higher-volume days finished worse than your quieter ones, which is what this page measures against your own median.
Does it include open positions?
No. Only closed trades with a result are counted. An open position has no outcome yet, and counting it as zero would drag every average toward the middle.
Which timezone are the days in?
Your browser's. A trade that closes at 23:50 in your timezone belongs to that day; the same trade for someone in another region may fall on the next one. For comparing your own days against each other this is consistent, which is what the comparison needs.
Are commissions included?
Yes, and that is deliberate. Every figure on the page is net of commission and swap. Broker files keep the gross result and the costs in separate columns, and they do not even agree on the sign — MetaTrader writes commission as a negative number, several others write it as a positive one. Reading only the gross column would have shown one sample day as +25.78 when it actually finished at −47.17 after costs.
One related honesty note about the fees row itself. Some exports — cTrader and several generic broker files when they carry a "Net P&L" column, plus Trading 212 and Tradovate — do not report costs separately at all; the charges are already inside the result figure. For those the page says not listed separately in this file rather than printing a zero, because a zero there would read as "you trade for free", which is never true.
Why is there no currency symbol on the numbers?
Because broker statements often do not state the account currency, and printing a dollar sign on a euro account would be an invented detail. The figures are in whatever currency your account is denominated in.