A broker statement is a list of fills. A journal needs trades.
Open any broker’s tradebook and you get rows: a buy at 9:31, a sell at 9:34, maybe three more of each before lunch on a day you scaled in and out of one NIFTY option. None of those rows is “the trade.” The trade is what happens when you pair them up — and getting that pairing wrong is how a spreadsheet quietly reports a 68% win rate that’s actually 51%, because five winning scale-outs on one losing position each counted as their own row.
PnL Book pairs your fills first-in-first-out into round-trip trades. A buy for 150 shares followed by a sell for 50 and a sell for 100 becomes one trade with one entry, one exit, one net P&L — not three rows you have to reconcile by hand. Every statistic downstream, from win rate to the rupee cost of a tagged mistake, is computed on that paired trade, not the raw execution log.
The two cases that break most naive pairing logic
Two situations trip up a simple “match buys to sells” approach, and both come up constantly in real F&O and intraday trading. First: a fill that crosses zero — a sell that closes your existing long and opens a new short in the same execution. PnL Book splits that fill into a closed round trip at the correct quantity and a freshly opened position at the remainder, instead of either miscounting your net exposure or dropping the second leg. Second: an execution that needs to be split across two trades — the tail end of one round trip and the opening quantity of the next, all in a single fill. The pairing engine allocates that execution across both trades rather than assigning the whole thing to one and leaving the other short.
Neither case is exotic. If you scale into and out of positions, average down, or trade multiple lots of an option through the day, you’ve generated both patterns without thinking about it — and a journal that pairs fills naively will quietly misreport your win rate, average loss and drawdown from day one.
What gets built on top of correctly paired trades
Pairing is the foundation, not the feature — it’s what everything else in analytics, mistake tagging and the weekly AI review is computed from. Get 14 rows out of a scale-in/scale-out sequence and your expectancy is noise; get one correctly priced trade out of it and every number built on top of that trade — this month’s revenge-trading cost, this week’s win rate, the coach letter that cites it — is actually measuring something real.
Getting fills in is the part most journals make you do by hand. Broker import covers the 14 sources PnL Book reads directly, and screenshot import covers everything else — a photo of a positions screen becomes the same paired trade as a full CSV export, reviewed before anything saves.
Frequently asked questions
What does "FIFO round-trip pairing" actually mean?
Your broker gives you a list of fills — a buy at 9:31, a sell at 9:34, maybe three more of each before lunch. PnL Book pairs those fills first-in-first-out into round-trip trades, so "bought 150, sold 50, sold 100" becomes one trade with one entry, one exit and one net P&L — not three disconnected rows you have to reconcile by hand.
Does it handle a position that goes long to short in one sequence?
Yes. If a sell closes your long and then opens a short — a fill that crosses zero — the pairing engine splits it into a closed round trip and a new open position at the correct quantities, instead of miscounting your net exposure.
What if one execution needs to be split across two trades?
That happens whenever a single fill's quantity closes one open trade and starts another, or covers the tail end of one round trip and the start of the next. PnL Book allocates the execution across both trades correctly rather than assigning it to just one.
Does PnL Book give me trade signals based on my journal?
No. PnL Book analyzes your own past trades — it turns fills into trades and prices your patterns. It never gives investment advice, tips or trading signals, and it is not affiliated with any broker or exchange.