Forex with Interactive Brokers

When importing Forex trades from Interactive Brokers, the importer behavior is slightly different to work around some oddities in the way IB exports the data.

Exported Data

When exporting data from IB in TradeLog format, the forex trades will show up in the export file as expected. However, any adjustments made in the account, such as shifting cash between currencies, will also show up. The problem is, these adjustments look identical to actual trades, so Tradervue cannot tell the difference.

While these adjustments are difficult to discern for Tradervue's automated importer, they are typically easy for the trader to spot. So when the importer detects that one of these adjustments has likely occurred, it will stop trying to split trades. Let's look at an example.

Example

Suppose you export the following transactions from IB:

So now, the first trade looks fine, and the other executions are all grouped together (this second trade will be shown as "open"). When displayed this way, it's easy to look at and see that one line is an adjustment. You can then use the Manual Execution Editor to just delete the -10 execution in the second trade, and then all of your data will be as you expect.

Once you have your adjustments deleted, you may then want to split the trade, since many executions were probably grouped together during this process. To do that, just split the trade as normal - click "Advanced" (on the right just about the execution list), then click "Split".