Steam keeps several records of what happens to your CS2 items, and four of them matter when you trade: Trade History, Offer History, Inventory History and your Market history. Each answers a different question, from "did that trade go through" to "where did this skin go". Knowing which one to open saves time after a failed offer, a disputed deal or a suspicious login.
Four records and where to find them
All four are records of your own account. Trade History and Inventory History have addresses starting with steamcommunity.com/my/, which open the pages of whichever account you're signed in to.
| Record | Where to open it | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Trade History | The Trade Offers page, or the "..." drop-down on your inventory | Your trades, and reversals of protected CS2 trades |
| Offer History | The Trade Offers page | Offers that are no longer active |
| Inventory History | steamcommunity.com/my/inventoryhistory | Items arriving and leaving, not just through trades |
| Market history | The top of the Community Market home page, or Account Details in the Steam store | Your own Market sales and purchases |
Steam trade history: how to check your past trades
Valve's trade offer FAQ gives two ways in: the Trade Offers page in your inventory, or the "..." drop-down on the inventory page. Each entry is a trade, with when it happened and the items that went each way.
That makes it the place to check whether a deal happened at all. If accepting an offer ends in an error, look here before you try again: one developer of Steam trading tools suggests reading Steam's trade records to check whether a "failed" offer actually went through.
Trade History is also where reversals start. CS2 items you receive in a trade are Trade Protected for seven days, and Valve's FAQ says you can review the trades containing protected items, and begin reversing them, from this page. It also gives a direct link to the eligible trades at help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpTradeRestore.
A reversal is all or nothing: it undoes every protected trade from the last seven days, and the account that starts it can't trade or use the Market for 30 days. Our guide to Steam trade protection covers the rules in full.
Offer History: offers that never became trades
Offers that stop being active move to Offer History, on the same Trade Offers page as your pending offers. Items stay in your inventory while an offer is pending, so you can offer the same skin to several people. Once one of them accepts, Valve says the other offers with those items turn inactive and move to Offer History.
An offer also goes inactive if one of its items is traded away or sold on the Market first, and any offer nobody answers expires after two weeks. A counter-offer doesn't edit the original either: Valve says it goes back as a new offer.
So Offer History only tells you an offer existed; to see whether items changed hands, find the trade itself in Trade History. If someone insists they accepted your offer, or that they sent you one, compare the two pages before you send anything else. Our guide to how Steam trade offers work covers sending, countering and confirming.
Steam inventory history: items in and out
Inventory History is the widest of the four records. Valve added it in the September 6, 2011 Steam client update that introduced trading, describing a page that "shows past trades you've made". It now logs far more than trades, from drops and unboxings to Market listings and sales.
Open it at steamcommunity.com/my/inventoryhistory. You can filter it to Counter-Strike 2 only, and Jump to date takes you straight to a day instead of loading page after page.
CS2 entries use labels from the game's own English text file, such as these:
| What you did | Label |
|---|---|
| Opened a case or capsule | Unlocked a container |
| Completed a trade-up contract | Crafted |
| Applied or removed a sticker | Sticker applied, Sticker removed |
| Named an item | Name Tag applied |
| Put an item in storage | Moved to Storage Unit |
| Swapped StatTrak™ counters | Swapped StatTrak™ values |
| Finished a mission | Mission reward |
| Bought from the in-game store | Purchased from the store |
Trades and Market activity show up too. A trade reads "You traded with" followed by the other account's name, and Market listings, sales and purchases get entries of their own.
The page has gaps. The developer of one tool that reads it automatically documents skipped entries when many events share the same time, such as a batch of Market listings confirmed at once, and a Load More History button that disappears before the real end. If something seems to be missing, use Jump to date to go to where the gap starts and look again.
Your Market history and receipts
Your Market history is the record of your own Community Market transactions, not an item's price chart. Valve's Market FAQ says it's reachable from the top of the Community Market home page and from your Account Details page in the Steam store. Steam also emails a receipt for each transaction. Store purchases and Steam's own spending total are covered in our guide to Steam account value.
Two of Valve's Market rules make the record worth keeping. Purchases are final: once a Market transaction completes there's no refund or reversal, unlike a protected trade. And Valve says working out any income tax on your sales is your responsibility, suggesting a tax advisor if you're unsure, so keep the receipts.
After a suspicious login
First make sure you control the account. Valve's trade protection FAQ says to contact Steam Support if you need help regaining control or aren't sure whether someone else has access. Our guide to recovering a hijacked Steam account walks through that. Then work through the records:
- Trade History, for trades you don't recognise. Protected CS2 trades from the last seven days can still be reversed there.
- Offer History and your pending offers, for offers you didn't send.
- Inventory History, for items that left another way, such as a Market listing you didn't create.
- Market history, for sales you didn't make.
Move quickly, because the records explain what happened but don't bring items back. Valve's item restoration policy says Steam Support doesn't restore items that have left an account for any reason, including trades, Market transactions, deletions and gifts. For CS2, the seven-day reversal is the exception.
If you find trades or offers you don't recognise, also check whether the account has a Web API key you didn't create: an access key for Steam's developer interface that can read your offers and trade history. Our API key scam guide shows how to check and what to do next.
Sources
- Steam Trade Offers — Steam Support
- Trade Protected Items — Steam Support
- Community Market FAQ — Steam Support
- Steam Item Restoration Policy — Steam Support
- Steam client update released, September 6, 2011 — Steam News
- csgo_english.txt, CS2 English text — GameTracking-CS2 on GitHub
- Inventory History documentation — BoosterManager on GitHub
- node-steam-inventoryhistory README — GitHub
