Here’s another lesser-known feature in Trader Workstation that I encourage traders to explore.
Getting a list of your trade executions in any trading platform can be a pain – especially when you should be adding your trades to your journal daily.
Because you should be doing it routinely, it’s worth thinking about how to make this process as smooth as possible by removing as much friction as you can.
Most IB traders – if they track their performance with a journal at all – wait until the following morning for the daily execution report to become available in their IB account.
If you wait until then, you’ll likely forget important details about your trades that you need to capture when they’re fresh in your mind.
Here’s where the Export Reports feature in TWS comes in handy.
The image above shows how to enable it. Once activated, every few minutes (I have mine set to 5), TWS writes a CSV file with all your executions for the day to a folder you specify.
You can control which fields are written, including the important Order Reference field which can be used in your custom program to specify which strategy the trade came from.
This lets you keep an automatic archive of all your executions so you don’t have to remember how to generate the list in your IB account. (I always forget how to do it and have to relearn it every time!)
Here’s a screenshot of the CSV files in my export directory – the oldest one is from 2016:
Not only does this provide a convenient archive, but you can use the files to easily enter trades into your journal.
I have a script that I run via an AutoHotKey shortcut that looks for today’s file, formats it exactly the way TraderVue expects, and copies the content to my clipboard.
Then I just paste it in the TraderVue trade import field – no data entry required.
This will soon be coming to DAS Trader – I put in a request to them recently for this feature and they’ve confirmed they’re working on it now.
