This morning, I was trying to remember how to export transactions in my Scottrade account to a spreadsheet. I recalled having done this before.
I found this page which confirmed for me that I am correct in thinking that this can be done
Here are the steps I followed to export my buy and sell orders to an Excel spreadsheet:
- Log in to your account
- Choose the My Account tab at the top of the page
- Choose Account History from the menu on the left side of the page
- Allow the Transactions tab to continue to be the default choice at the top of the page
- Find the dates pull-down menu that has a date range, such as Last 7 Days
- Change the pull-down menu to Select Dates
- Choose a date range to the right of the pull-down menu
- Immiediately below the date range pull-down menu is is another pull-down menu called Transactions. Change this pull-down menu from All Types to Trades if you do not wish to be swamped with data
- Immediately to the right of the Transactions menu is a Security Type menu. With this menu you should be able to differentiate between Stocks or Options or other security types. Use this menu to further filter your data.
- Press the Go button
- All date-range transactions will appear on your screen
- If you prefer chronological order over reverse chronological order clicking on Date at the top left-hand corner of the heading for all transactions does nothing to alter the saved spreadsheet. Sorry!
- When all your transactions appear on the screen, press the Export to Excel button in the bottom left-hand corner just below your transactions
- Use your favorite utility to translate all transactions from reverse chronological order to chronological order. For Linux users, the Unix tac command works. Sorry. I don't know what to suggest for Windows users or for users on other platforms.
- If you do decide to reverse the chronology of the transactions, you might want to put the heading back on the first line of the file. Reversing the chronology of transactions moves the heading to the last line of the file.
- To place the heading back on the first line of the CSV file, use your favorite text editor. I use Vim, but you might but you might prefer Notepad under Windows or whatever text editor you like to use under your favorite operating system
- Examine the CSV file for transactions you have no interest in with a text editor. Many transactions are pure Cash transactions with Cash as the stock symbol. You may wish to eliminate these to eliminate excess clutter in your transaction data. See above step where you choose what kind of data you want via the Transactions pull-down menu for a better way to eliminate extraneous data. If you are not able to eliminate data with the Transactions pull-down menu, you can always do it now with a text editor.
Once the spreadsheet has been exported, you'll find that the filename includes a timestamp in YY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS format.
It occurs to me that the spreadsheet file can really be imported into any spreadsheet. I just looked at the file and it is a CSV file which is comma separated values. In other words, the file is not exclusively an Excel spreadsheet file. It is really a file that is compatible with any spreadsheet.
Here's a Wikipedia article on CSV files if you are interested and want to know more:
Ed Abbott
