Supported formats
VECTOR reads the trade exports your broker or backtester already produces. Several formats are recognised automatically; everything else goes through a universal mapping engine.
Recognised automatically
Drop one of these and it imports with no configuration:
| Source | Notes |
|---|---|
| Option Omega | Portfolio or single-strategy exports. Trade-level detail is retained for Risk Sizing. |
| TradeStation | Export the full Trades List report. |
| TradingView | Strategy-tester "List of trades" export. |
| Interactive Brokers | Activity Statement export. Reads the executed-trades section (Dettaglio eseguiti / Trades) and sums the realized P/L of each fill on its close date. |
| Portfolio Builder | Native export. |
| Invest Studio | A daily equity export (not per-trade — so it has no trade count). |
Interactive Brokers specifics
An IBKR Activity Statement bundles every asset class and several non-trade items. VECTOR reads it deliberately:
- Split by asset category. If the executed-trades section spans more than one asset category (options, stocks, futures…), the review step asks whether to load it as one aggregated line or to split into a line per category — the same choice offered for Option Omega portfolios. With a single category it imports straight to one line.
- Currency conversion is optional and separate. When the account base currency differs from the traded currency (e.g. a EUR account trading USD options), the statement books a cash FX conversion P/L on the idle cash. That isn't a trade — it has no per-day detail and lives in the Cash Report, not the executions. It's excluded by default; you can opt in from the review step to add it as a separate Forex (cash conversion) line: a single point at the statement's period end. It stays a distinct line — never merged into the trade curve — because it's in the base currency while the trades may be in another.
The universal engine — for everything else
If a file isn't one of the above, VECTOR's mapping engine locates the date and the profit/loss automatically. It comfortably handles tastytrade (via its cash ledger), NinjaTrader, MetaTrader, Sierra Chart and, in general, any CSV that contains a date and a P/L (or something P/L can be derived from). How it decides is covered in How import works.
File types & limits
.csv, .txt, .xlsx, .xls. (Excel needs the openpyxl package on the server — if it's missing, export to CSV.)$1,234.56, parenthesised negatives (123.45), and EU/US decimal styles are parsed.The canonical shape
Whatever the input, VECTOR reduces each strategy to a single series: one profit/loss value per day (multiple trades on the same day are summed). That uniform shape is what makes strategies from different platforms directly comparable.
Minimum requirement
A file is ingestible if VECTOR can find a date and a P/L — either directly, from a cash-flow ledger (value minus commissions and fees), or from a running equity/balance column it can difference day to day. Files with none of these (e.g. position snapshots or holdings reports) can't be turned into a P/L series.
Next: How import works — the mapping engine and the review step.