Importing your trades from cTrader

cTrader is the trading platform of many forex and CFD brokers and prop firms. On Trader and Pro you can connect your cTrader account, and your trades then appear in your journal by themselves, marked cTrader, so you spend your time on reviewing them instead of typing them over.

Trader includes 1 connection and Pro up to 3, so on Pro you can connect cTrader next to a crypto exchange such as OKX. One connection is one cTrader account. If you have more connections than your plan includes (for example after switching from Pro to Trader), the oldest keep syncing and the others are paused until you disconnect one or upgrade.

Luxabit only reads. You don't create an API key: you log in on cTrader and allow Luxabit to view your accounts. With that access Luxabit cannot place, change or close trades, and cannot move money.

Setting it up

1. In Luxabit, open your Account page, choose cTrader under Connect an exchange and click Log in on cTrader.
2. Log in with your cTrader ID: the login you use for the cTrader of your broker or prop firm.
3. Allow Luxabit to view your accounts. You then come back to your account page.
4. Choose the account to import. Live and demo accounts are both listed, so a prop firm challenge on a demo account works too. Optionally, choose the date from which your trades are imported, and connect.

Luxabit imports your trades straight away. Using prop firm mode? Your imported trades count towards your daily loss limit and maximum drawdown once you add the risk per trade.

What is imported

• Positions: cTrader keeps a position per trade, with deals that open it and close it, in part or in full. Each position becomes one trade. The entry is the average price of the deals that opened it, the exit the average price of the deals that closed it. Positions still open are imported as open trades and closed by a later sync.
• Instruments: forex pairs, metals such as gold and silver, indices and other CFDs. A broker's suffix (such as EURUSD.r) is left off, and forex pairs and metals use the usual TradingView symbols for their charts.
• History: trades opened from the date you chose, at most 90 days back. Deals that close a position opened before that are left out.
• Size and fees: the size is in units (lots times the contract size, such as 100,000 per lot of EURUSD), so profit and loss is in the instrument's quote currency. Fees are the commission plus the swap paid on closing, converted from your account currency with the rate cTrader reports. For a trade that is still open, the fees are filled in once it closes.

Orders that haven't filled yet

A limit or stop order on cTrader that waits to open a trade shows in your journal as a planned trade, with the order price as its entry and the stop-loss and take-profit you set on the order. Orders that close a position are left out. At each sync:

• Filled: the planned trade becomes the open trade, with the price and size it filled at. What you added to it (notes, tags, strategy, your answers to your own rules) stays.
• Cancelled or expired without a fill: the planned trade is marked skipped.
• Changed on cTrader: a new price or size is taken over.

Stop-loss and take-profit

Luxabit reads your stop-loss and take-profit from the orders of each position on cTrader, and from the position itself while it is open. The first stop counts, so your realised R is measured against the risk the trade started with.

A trade without a stop-loss shows No stop in the journal, has no R and fails "stop-loss set" in your Discipline Score. Had a mental stop? Open the trade and fill it in; a later sync leaves it as you set it. A stop you moved into profit shows Stop moved, because cTrader only keeps the last price of a stop and the original level is then unknown.

Keeping it up to date

The journal syncs by itself every day and whenever you open it, and you can press Sync now at any time. While a trade plan you made in the chat waits for its trade, the chat also checks every few minutes; a new trade that carries out that plan is linked to it. Each sync adds new trades and closes open ones, keeps your waiting orders up to date, updates what comes from cTrader (prices, size, fees and times) and leaves what you added alone: your stop-loss, notes, tags, strategy and answers to your own rules. A trade you delete from the journal is not imported again.

The access cTrader gives Luxabit lasts about a month at a time; Luxabit renews it by itself while the connection is in use. If cTrader ends it (for example because you removed Luxabit in your cTrader ID), your account page says so and you log in on cTrader again there.

Your access and your data

The access is stored encrypted and is only used to read your trades and, for the position size calculator, the balance of your trading account when it is in US dollars, which is not stored. Disconnect on your account page deletes it; trades already imported stay in your journal. You can also remove Luxabit under the connected apps of your cTrader ID. If your plan changes to Starter, syncing stops and your imported trades stay. Trading on MetaTrader or another platform? Import a file instead. See Account and data.