A Fidelity trading journal is a record of your Fidelity trades with what the account history leaves out: the plan before each entry, the result in R and whether the rules were followed. Instead of typing every fill, you download the account history from fidelity.com as a CSV file and import it.
How to download your Fidelity trades
- Sign in at fidelity.com and open the account under Accounts & Trade.
- Go to Activity & Orders and choose History.
- Pick a single account and the date range, then use Download to save the history as CSV.
Choose one account rather than all accounts: a file for all accounts is laid out differently and mixes trades that can't be matched. For a long history, download several shorter periods.
How the file describes a trade
Each line is one transaction, with Run Date, Action, Symbol, Quantity, Price ($), Commission ($) and Fees ($). The Action column is written out in words:
| Action begins with | Meaning in the journal |
|---|---|
| YOU BOUGHT | Opens or adds to a long |
| YOU SOLD | Reduces or closes a long |
| YOU SOLD SHORT SALE | Opens a short |
| YOU BOUGHT SHORT COVER | Covers a short |
| DIVIDEND, REINVESTMENT, INTEREST, TRANSFER | Not trades: left out |
Commission and fees are separate columns and both count as the fill's cost. The dates have no time of day, so trades on the same day keep the file's order. Fidelity has used two column orders over the years, with Price before or after Quantity; matching columns by name rather than position handles both. The file may end with a block of disclaimer text, which is not a trade.
Worked example (illustrative numbers)
Illustrative numbers only. The history shows, for a made-up ticker XMPL, "YOU SOLD SHORT SALE 100" at $62.00 on 10 June and "YOU BOUGHT SHORT COVER 100" at $58.50 on 17 June, with $0.10 of fees on each. The import makes one closed short trade: $350 before fees, $349.80 after. With the plan's stop of $64.00 added in the journal, 1R was $2.00 a share and the trade made +1.75R.
After the import
An imported trade has fills and fees but no plan. For each one, add the stop you planned, the target, the setup and one line on why you took the trade. That turns the P&L into R, lets the statistics group trades by setup, and gives the review something to compare the execution with. Then set a fixed time each week to read the closed trades; see how to review your trades.
Common mistakes
- Downloading all accounts at once. Pick one account per file.
- A period that starts mid-position. Sales whose purchase is before the start date are left out. Begin on a day with no open positions.
- Core money-market and mutual-fund lines. Purchases of funds such as the cash sweep look like trades with stock-like symbols; delete them from the file before importing.
- Options. Option lines are skipped: the journal covers US stocks and ETFs.
- Stopping at the import. Add the stop and setup to each trade to see R and check the rules.
In Clear Tape
In the trade journal (Journal in the dashboard menu), Import CSV has a Fidelity preset that reads the account history's columns by name, understands the four kinds of buy and sell actions above, adds commission and fees together and skips other actions. The file is read in your browser, only the trades are sent, and Clear Tape never connects to your Fidelity account. The preview lists the trades found, the lines left out with the reason, and trades already in the journal. The import is free on every plan; see the trade journal page. Other brokers: import trades from any broker's CSV.
To check the habits in this export before importing it, open it in the free trade history analyzer, which recognizes the Fidelity file.
For educational purposes only. Not investment advice.