The Trading Combine is elegantly simple: hit your profit target without breaching your maximum loss limit. One step, one rule. What trips most traders up isn't the rule itself - it's the behavioral drift that happens across dozens of sessions. A string of good days breeds overconfidence. A losing day triggers revenge trading. A recovery attempt blows the limit.
The traders who pass the Combine and build lasting Express Funded Accounts tend to share one habit: they review their trading systematically, not just on bad days. They know which setups work for them, which sessions they consistently overextend in, and where their discipline breaks down under pressure.
TraderInsight.pro gives you the analytical infrastructure to do that review properly. Import your TopstepX history and get performance reports built around your actual data, a tagging system to categorize trades by setup and rule compliance, trade notes to document your session-by-session reasoning, and AI analysis to surface patterns you might not catch manually.
The Three Stages Where a Journal Pays Off
Topstep's path runs from the Trading Combine to the Express Funded Account (XFA) to the Live Funded Account. Each stage has different pressures - and a journal helps you navigate all three in a different way.
During the Trading Combine, a journal helps you stay honest about whether your entries follow your stated rules or are driven by impatience and market noise. The Calendar view makes the pattern of your daily P&L visible at a glance - useful for spotting the sessions where you consistently overtrade or hold losers too long.
In the Express Funded Account, the profit target is gone but the consistency requirement takes its place. Topstep is watching whether your performance is repeatable, not just lucky. The comparison report lets you stack your Combine performance against your XFA performance side by side - behavioral shifts, like increasing your size after a payout or abandoning setups that felt "too slow," show up clearly in the data.
On the path to a Live Funded Account, Topstep's risk team is evaluating whether your track record justifies real capital. A structured journal with tagged trades and session notes is the difference between being able to explain your process and just pointing at a P&L number.
How to Export Your Trade History from TopstepX
TopstepX is Topstep's proprietary platform, and trade history lives within it. Here's how to get your data out.
From the TopstepX platform directly:
- Log into TopstepX at topstep.com.
- Navigate to your Trade Report from the dashboard - this is the same report that confirms whether you've passed the Combine.
- Look for a Download or Export option to save your trade data as a CSV.
Your Trade Report updates in real time on the new dashboard. If you're on the legacy dashboard, reports refresh Monday–Friday between 5–6 PM CT.
If you trade via a connected platform (NinjaTrader, Tradovate, etc.):
Some TopstepX traders use connected platforms for execution. If that's your setup, export from your connected platform and import using the corresponding preset in TraderInsight.pro:
- Tradovate: Hover over your account name, click the gear icon, go to the Orders tab, set your date range, and click Download CSV.
- NinjaTrader: Open Trade Performance → set the Display to Executions → right-click the grid → Export.
Importing into TraderInsight.pro
- Go to the Import page.
- Drag and drop your CSV file.
- Done.
Building Your Review Practice Around the Combine Rules
Once your data is imported, structure your journaling around what actually determines success at Topstep:
- Use tags to label every trade by setup type and whether it followed your rules. Over time, this lets you filter your history to see only the trades that matched your process - and separately, only the ones that didn't.
- Write session notes that document your pre-session plan and what deviated from it. When you later review a session that went sideways, the note tells you exactly what you were thinking - which is far more useful than staring at a P&L line.
- Use AI chat to ask questions about your data directly: "How do my results change when I take more than 5 trades in a session?" or "What's my P&L on trades taken after a losing trade?" - these behavioral questions are often the key to understanding why the Combine is harder than it looks.
- If you're working with a Topstep coach or trading community, the sharing feature lets you give them access to your journal for structured feedback without exposing any account credentials.
Questions?
If your export doesn't load correctly, email the team with your file. TopstepX format variations are sorted out quickly.
