The first time you sign in, your Dashboard shows sample data with a banner across the top — this is just a preview of every chart and metric, not your real trades. Every other page (Trades, Journal, Reviews, Settings) starts genuinely empty until you import.
Once you've imported at least one trade on an account, that sample data disappears and every chart switches to your real numbers.
ExpectancyIQ doesn't have a "log a trade" form — trades come in through Import, via a CSV file exported from your broker or platform, so re-run an import whenever you want to bring in new trades.
The one exception is cTrader: on a paid plan you can connect the account once in Settings → Trading Accounts and closed trades import themselves from then on — on every dashboard visit and daily in the background. Access is read-only, the first sync backfills your existing history, and anything you already imported by CSV isn't double-counted.
Supported formats
- Tradovate — completed round-trip trades export.
- Tradovate (fills) — raw per-fill executions; matched into round-trip trades automatically.
- NinjaTrader — Trades grid export.
- cTrader — trade history export.
- Topstep — TopstepX export.
- Generic CSV / Generic CSV (Entry/Exit + Side) — manual fallback if your file isn't auto-detected. Pick whichever shape matches your columns: buy/sell prices, or entry/exit price with a separate side column.
The import wizard
Three steps, in order:
- Upload — pick your CSV. ExpectancyIQ tries to auto-detect the platform from the column headers.
- Map — check that each column lines up with the right field. Fields marked with a red
*are required; the wizard won't let you continue until every required field is mapped. - Preview — see every parsed trade before anything is saved, including any rows that failed validation, so you can fix the file and re-upload instead of importing bad data.
Common import errors
If a row fails validation, the Preview step shows exactly why. The usual causes:
- Missing symbol, quantity, price, or timestamp columns
- Quantity or price of zero (or blank)
- Exit time earlier than entry time
- A P&L column that doesn't match what ExpectancyIQ computes for that contract — worth double-checking your export for a stale or edited value
- An unrecognized contract symbol with no P&L column to fall back on
Importing a file whose date range overlaps trades you've already imported from a different source will warn you before saving — importing both could double-count the same trades. Duplicate rows within a single file are automatically skipped.
No dedicated sample CSV to download yet — the closest thing is the Export CSV button on the Trade Log tab (Dashboard), which produces a file in a format you can re-import, useful as a template for your own spreadsheet.
The Trades page lists every imported trade — searchable and filterable by symbol, direction, result, and more. Click any row to open its detail drawer, showing entry/exit price and time, duration, gross and net P&L, fees, and a link straight to that day's journal entry.
Importing a trade only brings in the raw numbers. Everything else — why you took it, what went right or wrong, how it felt — you add yourself from the trade detail drawer. There are a few distinct places to do this, each suited to a different kind of note:
1. Set up your labels once (Settings → Taxonomy)
Strategy, Sub-strategy, Confluences, Mistakes, and Emotion are all label lists you define yourself under Settings → Taxonomy — click "Add" under any category to create a new label. You only need to do this once per label; after that it's reusable across every trade. You can also create a new label on the fly from inside a trade's drawer via the "+ Add new…" option — it gets saved back to Settings → Taxonomy automatically.
2. Apply them in the trade's "Structured capture" panel
Open a trade, find the Structured capture section, and pick from your Strategy/Sub-strategy/Confluence/Mistake labels for that specific trade. This is also where you can record your planned R:R, planned risk in dollars, and stop price for the trade.
3. Tags, Notes & Screenshots
Tags are separate from taxonomy — free-form text you type directly on a trade, with no setup required (unlike taxonomy labels, which live in Settings). Use tags for quick, one-off labels; use taxonomy for the categories you want to analyze trends across. Notes is a free-text field with its own Save button. Screenshots lets you drag or click to attach chart images to the trade — these are stored privately and only visible to you.
4. Trade journal (mood, emotions, reflection)
Further down the drawer, the Trade journal section lets you rate your mood 1–5, pick emotion tags, and write a longer Markdown reflection (with a Preview toggle) — this is the trade-level equivalent of the daily journal, scoped to a single trade.
The Journal page is day-level, not trade-level: pre-market and post-market notes, a daily checklist, and mood tags for the day as a whole, alongside every trade you took that day. Journal → Entries is a searchable history of every daily, weekly, and monthly entry you've written.
Reviews summarizes a full week or month at once — headline stats for the period plus a free-form written review, and you can navigate back through past periods.
A filter bar at the top of the Dashboard (account, symbol, direction, session, result, strategy, confluence, date range, and more) applies across every tab below:
- Overview — equity curve, drawdown, monthly/weekly P&L, calendar heatmap
- Insights — automatically surfaced patterns and standout stats across your trades
- Performance — win rate and expectancy trends, P&L histogram, R:R distribution
- Time & Session — best sessions/days/hours, overtrading and re-entry patterns
- Symbols & Markets — per-symbol win rate and P&L breakdown
- Risk & Discipline — drawdown tracking, loss-limit compliance, tilt indicators
- Strategy — P&L and win rate broken down by strategy and sub-strategy
- Mistakes — mistake frequency and cost, clean-vs-mistake comparisons
- Trade Log — a filtered, searchable table with CSV export and a running account balance
- Risk Simulator — a Monte Carlo-style projection of your account balance
- Profile — display name and trading timezone
- Billing — subscribe or manage your subscription
- Risk & Limits — per-account drawdown, daily loss limit, profit target, and consistency rules, used across the analytics dashboards
- Commission Rates — your broker's commission per contract, used when a CSV doesn't state it
- Exchange & Regulatory Fees — the venue's own charges. Broker exports usually leave these out, so we add them from the contract's published rates; you only need this card for a product we don't know yet
- Taxonomy — your Strategy/Sub-strategy/Confluence/Mistake/Emotion labels (see "Enriching a trade" above)
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