Alpha Ledger vs your broker’s reporting
Your broker has every trade you have ever placed and can tell you almost nothing useful about them.
A broker statement is an accounting record. It exists to prove what was executed, at what price, with what fees — and for that job it is authoritative and you should keep it.
What it is not is a diagnostic. It has no idea which trades were part of your plan and which were revenge. It does not know your intended stop, so it cannot tell you when you moved one. It reports gross and net, not expectancy, and it certainly will not tell you that your losses cluster in the hour after a losing trade.
Alpha Ledger reads the same execution data, then adds the layer your broker has no access to: intent. Planned entry, planned stop, setup, reasoning, screenshots, and how you felt. The analysis lives in the gap between what you meant to do and what you did.
Side by side
The same jobs, done two ways
| What you are trying to do | Broker reports | Alpha Ledger |
|---|---|---|
| What was executed | Authoritative. This is the source of truth and always will be. | Imported from the broker, reconciled, and flagged if the statement P&L disagrees with the computed figure. |
| Why it was executed | Not recorded anywhere. | Setup, plan, reasoning, tags, screenshots and confidence, captured at the time. |
| Risk taken | Lot size only. No notion of what you were risking as a percentage or in R. | Planned stop turns every trade into an R multiple, so a 0.1-lot gold trade and a 2-lot forex trade become comparable. |
| Behaviour | Invisible. | Eight detectors — revenge trading, moved stops, risk creep, overtrading, held losers, cut winners, no-plan entries, session drift — each priced in dollars. |
| Time analysis | Timestamps only, no aggregation. | Performance by hour, day, session and holding period, in your timezone, with DST handled. |
| Across brokers | One statement per account. Nothing combines them. | Every account in one place, with symbol aliases resolved so the same instrument matches across brokers. |
| Costs | Commission and swap per trade, which is genuinely useful. | The same figures, aggregated: what costs took from your edge over the period, and which instruments carry the most. |
This page compares Alpha Ledger with a category of alternative, not with any named product. Claims about the alternative are ones that hold for the category generally; individual tools vary.
The other side
Where broker reports win
A comparison that concedes nothing is an advertisement. These are real advantages, and for some traders they are decisive.
It is the legal record
For tax, for disputes, for anything official, the broker statement wins and nothing we compute replaces it.
It cannot be wrong about fills
A journal reconstructs; a statement reports. Where they disagree, the statement is right, and Alpha Ledger flags the disagreement rather than hiding it.
Swap and commission are exact
Financing charges in particular are fiddly, and your broker has the authoritative numbers. We import them rather than estimating.
It is already there
No setup, no subscription. If you only need to know your balance, you already have what you need.
From statements to a journal
- 1Connect the account read-only, or export the statement as CSV, HTML or XLSX.
- 2Presets exist for the common platform export formats; anything else is mapped column by column.
- 3History imports in full, so your metrics start with everything you have already traded.
- 4From then on, sync runs every five minutes and new trades appear on their own.
Broker connections are read-only. Alpha Ledger has no code path that can place, modify or close an order.
Questions
Try it against your own trades
Import a CSV and see what eleven months of your history says. Free tier, no card.