Guide
How to read an MT4/MT5 trade history export
A raw trade history export looks like a plain spreadsheet, but it's easy to pull the wrong numbers out of one without realizing it. A few things worth knowing before trusting any stat calculated from a report file.
It's not just trades
An MT4 "Account History" report or MT5 deals export includes every entry on the account, not only closed trades — balance adjustments, deposits, withdrawals, and credit entries all show up in the same list, usually distinguished only by a "type" column (buy/sell for real trades, balance or similar for everything else). Include those rows in a profit calculation and the numbers stop describing the strategy's actual trading performance; a $5,000 manual deposit reads identically to a $5,000 winning trade unless it's filtered out first.
Open and close are two separate rows in MT4, one row in MT5
MT4's "Account History" export lists a trade's open and its close on the same line, with a paired open/close time and open/close price. MT5's deals export is structured differently — deals (individual fills) rather than completed round-trip trades — so a single position can appear as multiple deal rows that need pairing back together by position ID before per-trade profit means anything. Mixing up the two formats, or treating an MT5 deals list as if every row were a closed trade, produces trade counts and profit figures that don't match reality.
Swap and commission aren't cosmetic
The "profit" column on most exports is net of swap and commission, but not always — and for a strategy that holds positions for days rather than hours, swap alone can be the difference between a profitable and unprofitable track record. A quick check worth doing on any export: sum the raw price-based P&L separately from swap and commission, and see how much of the total each accounts for. A strategy whose "profit" is mostly surviving swap costs rather than earning them is a different risk profile than one where trading itself is doing the work.
Partial closes fragment a single trade into several rows
Closing a position in stages (taking partial profit, then closing the rest later) shows up as multiple rows against what was, from a strategy-logic standpoint, one trade decision. Counted naively, this inflates the total trade count and can distort win-rate and average-trade-size figures, since a single winning trade closed in three stages contributes three "wins" instead of one.
Upload the raw export. The parsing is handled for you.
StrategyAudit accepts a plain CSV, an MT4 "Save as Report," or an MT5 deals export directly — no need to clean balance rows or pair deals by hand first.