Stop importing your trades. Connect cTrader and let your journal fill itself

Every trader who has kept a journal knows the failure mode. You start disciplined: export the statement on Sunday, import it, review. Week one is great. By week four the export is a chore you keep meaning to do, your journal is three weeks behind, and the trades you most needed to study are the ones you never got around to logging. The journal did not fail because it was bad. It failed because it depended on you remembering to feed it.

That is the whole reason we built free cTrader auto-sync. The most valuable journal is not the one with the most features — it is the one that is complete and current when you sit down to review. So we removed the step that breaks first: the manual import.

Connect once, and forget about it

You link your cTrader account through a secure sign-in. No password is ever shared with us, and the connection is read-only — it can see your trade history, and that is all. It cannot place an order, move money, or change anything about your account.

From that moment, Retrace pulls your trades on its own and keeps them current in the background. Close a position and it shows up in your journal shortly after, already reconstructed on real candles: entry, stop, take-profits and every partial, across every timeframe. There is no file to export, no CSV to drag in, nothing to remember. The journal maintains itself.

Why automatic beats manual, beyond convenience

The obvious win is that you save a few minutes a week. The real win is subtler and much bigger: an automatic journal is an honest journal.

When you import by hand, you unconsciously curate. The messy revenge-trading session, the day you blew your rules — those are exactly the days you least want to relive, so those are the imports that quietly never happen. An automatic feed does not let you edit history. Every trade is there, the ugly ones included, which means your stats reflect how you actually trade instead of how you prefer to remember it. That is the difference between a journal that flatters you and one that improves you.

It is free, and it stays free

Auto-sync is included on the free plan. Connect an account and the whole pipeline — sync, auto-charting, analytics, calendar, journal — is yours at no cost. You do not need a card, and you do not need to be on a paid plan to get the feature that matters most.

Still on MetaTrader? You are covered

cTrader connects directly, but plenty of traders live on MT4 or MT5. For those, statement import is still there and works exactly as before: drop in the HTML statement and your trades chart the same way, with partial closes reconstructed and everything deduplicated. Direct MetaTrader sync is on the roadmap; until then, import keeps you fully supported.

The point of removing the friction

A review process only compounds if it runs every week without fail. The surest way to make that happen is to remove the step most likely to be skipped. Connect cTrader once, let the trades flow in on their own, and spend your time on the part that actually makes you money: reading your history honestly and changing one thing at a time.