1.2. Exporting Your Tradebook
Everything Tradestory shows you is built from one kind of file: the tradebook. In this section, we look at what a tradebook is, how much of it to download, and where each broker keeps it.
What a Tradebook Is
A tradebook is your broker's record of every trade it carried out for you. Each row is one
trade: the date, the stock, whether it was a buy or a sell, the quantity and the price. It is
the broker's own account of the trades it carried out. Every broker lets you download it from their website or app, usually as a spreadsheet
(an .xlsx file) or a plain list of values (a .csv file).
Tradestory reads these files as your broker writes them. You never retype a trade, and you never change the file before uploading it.
How Much to Download
For your first upload, download your whole history: from your very first trade with that broker up to today.
The reason is that Tradestory works out your positions from your trades. If you hold 100 shares of a company today, Tradestory finds the buys that gave you those shares, and the sells that reduced them, and puts them in order. A tradebook that starts partway through your history leaves some of those buys out, and the positions built from it come out incomplete.
Some brokers let you download only a limited span of dates at a time. If yours does, download several files that together cover your whole history. Tradestory accepts several files in one go, and when two of the same broker's files overlap, it keeps one copy of each trade.
If part of your history is simply not available, Tradestory has a way to fill the gap, called a fix-up. We cover fix-ups in Chapter 3. For now, download as much as your broker offers.
Zerodha, Step by Step
Our example tradebook comes from Zerodha, so let's take Zerodha first. Zerodha keeps its tradebook in Console, its reports website:
- Sign in to Console and open Reports → Tradebook.
- Set the date range to run from your first trade to today.
- Download the tradebook as CSV.
Zerodha gives the file a name that begins with tradebook. There is no need to rename it.
Tradestory works out which broker a file came from when you upload it.
Other Brokers
Tradestory reads tradebooks from fourteen brokers. The table below shows where each one keeps its tradebook and the file type to choose. The steps inside each broker's site are much like Zerodha's: open the report, set the date range, and download.
| Broker | Where to find the tradebook | File type |
|---|---|---|
| Angel One | Angel One Web → Reports → Trade History | Excel (.xlsx) |
| Dhan | Dhan App or Web → Reports → Trade Book | CSV |
| Fyers | Fyers Web → My Account → Reports → Tradebook | CSV |
| Groww | Groww App or Web → Stocks → Orders, then Export | Excel (.xlsx) |
| HDFC Securities | HDFC Securities Web → Reports → Equity Trade Report | Excel (.xlsx) |
| ICICI Direct | ICICI Direct Web → Accounts → Transaction Statement, with "Equity" selected | CSV |
| INDmoney | INDmoney App or Web → Stocks → Reports → Transactions Report | Excel (.xlsx) |
| Kotak Securities | Kotak Neo Web → Reports → Tradebook (Equity) | Excel (.xlsx) or CSV |
| Motilal Oswal | Motilal Oswal (Rise) App or Web → Reports → Transactions / Trade Book | Excel (.xlsx) or CSV |
| Mstocks (Mirae Asset) | Mstocks App or Web → Reports → Trade History | Excel (.xlsx) |
| PhillipCapital | PhillipCapital Web → Reports → Trade Report | Excel (.xlsx) |
| ShareKhan | ShareKhan Trade Tiger or Web → Reports → Equity Trade Report | Excel (.xlsx) |
| Upstox | Upstox App or Web → Account → Reports → Tradebook | Excel (.xlsx) |
| Zerodha | Console → Reports → Tradebook | CSV |
A few brokers have a detail worth knowing:
- Motilal Oswal offers the tradebook as Excel and as CSV. Either works. For any one period, upload one of the two and leave the other aside, since Tradestory reads them as separate records.
- PhillipCapital has two similar reports. Choose the one called Trade Report.
- INDmoney and Dhan include futures and options trades in the same file. Tradestory reads the equity trades and leaves the rest.
If you invest through more than one broker, download a tradebook from each. They all go into the same place in Tradestory, and your positions from every broker appear together. Let's load our first tradebook.