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:

2012-03-26	EURAUD	buy	500,000
2012-03-26	EURAUD	sell	-250,000
2012-03-26	EURAUD	sell	-250,000
2012-03-27	EURAUD	sell (adjust)	-10
2012-04-05	EURAUD	buy	800,000
2012-04-05	EURAUD	sell	-800,000

Here we can see that ideally, we'd just ignore the -10 line. Tradervue can't do this automatically, but the merge settings will be automatically adjusted to make it easy.

If the importer just used the normal default behavior, Tradervue would import and group these into trades like this, splitting it each time it switched sides between long and short:

2012-03-26	EURAUD	buy	500,000
2012-03-26	EURAUD	sell	-250,000
2012-03-26	EURAUD	sell	-250,000
2012-03-27	EURAUD	sell	-10
2012-04-05	EURAUD	buy	10
2012-04-05	EURAUD	buy	799,990
2012-04-05	EURAUD	sell	-799,990
2012-04-05	EURAUD	sell	-10

Clearly this is not what you would want...and to fix it, you would need to edit and merge multiple trades.

Adjusted Import Behavior

To avoid the above problems, when Tradervue detects that this may be happening, it will start grouping together all further executions for the symbol in question. So after importing, it will look like:

2012-03-26	EURAUD	buy	500,000
2012-03-26	EURAUD	sell	-250,000
2012-03-26	EURAUD	sell	-250,000
2012-03-27	EURAUD	sell (adjust)	-10
2012-04-05	EURAUD	buy	800,000
2012-04-05	EURAUD	sell	-800,000

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".