MetaTrader Trade History Export: What It Gives You and What It Drops

Exporting your MetaTrader history is usually the first thing anyone does when they decide to get serious about journaling. It is the right instinct. Every trade you have ever taken is sitting in the terminal, and getting it out takes about thirty seconds.

Then the file lands and it is quietly disappointing. The numbers are all correct and the thing still does not answer the question you opened it to answer, which was some version of "so what should I stop doing?"

This is what the export contains, the one setting that decides whether it is usable at all, and the four things it will never have in it. Platform behaviour here was checked on 17 August 2026 against MetaQuotes' own MetaTrader 5 help pages and release notes.

Exporting From MT5

Open the Toolbox with Ctrl+T and select the History tab. Right-click inside it and set your period. The default is short, so for a full backfill choose Custom Period and set a start date well before your first trade.

Now the part that matters, and it happens before you export anything.

Right-click again and look at the top of the context menu. MT5 can show that same history four different ways: Positions, Deals, Orders, and Orders and Deals. Whichever one is active is what gets written to your file.

With the view set, right-click once more and use Report to save. XLSX opens directly in Excel or Google Sheets. HTML gives you a readable statement you can print or email. Recent builds also added report export straight from the File menu, including PDF, so if your menus look different from a tutorial you read, that is why.

Positions or Deals: The Choice That Breaks Imports

This is the single decision that determines whether the file is worth anything to a journal, and almost nothing explains it, so here it is plainly.

A deal is one execution. A position is one completed round trip.

Buy 1 lot of EUR/USD and close it an hour later, and MT5 recorded two deals: an entry deal and an exit deal. It also recorded one position. The entry deal carries no profit, because at the moment it executed there was no result yet. The exit deal carries the whole profit figure.

So the same trading week produces two very different files:

Import the Deals view into a journal expecting it to be a list of trades and the damage is specific: your trade count roughly doubles, and every entry row looks like a break-even trade because its profit is zero.

What that does to your win rate depends on how the journal treats scratches, which is the annoying part. If break-even rows count as losses, a 40% win rate reads as 20%. If they are ignored, the win rate survives but every per-trade average is computed over a sample half of which is not trades. Either way the numbers are wrong, nothing errors, and they are wrong in a direction plausible enough that you will believe them.

Partial closes make it worse. Scale out of one position in three chunks and the Deals view has four rows for a trade you experienced as one.

There is also an account-type wrinkle worth knowing. On a netting account you can only hold one position per symbol, so a second buy on the same pair increases the existing position rather than opening a new one. Two half-lot EUR/USD buys become a single one-lot position. On a hedging account, which is what most retail forex brokers offer, they stay separate and can even be opposite in direction. If your journal's trade count disagrees with your memory, netting is often the reason, and no export setting will change it.

Use Positions. It is the only view whose rows mean what a journal thinks a row means.

The Comment Column Confusion

Here is a wrinkle that sends people to the wrong view.

In the terminal, the Positions view has no Comment column. Traders who tag their trades with a comment, or who run several Expert Advisors and need to tell them apart, go looking for it, discover it only appears in the Deals view, and switch. Then they export from there and inherit the doubled-row problem above.

You do not have to make that trade. The exported Positions report is more detailed than the tab it came from, and it carries Open Comment and Close Comment as their own columns. Export Positions, then open the file. Your comments are in it.

What the Positions Export Actually Contains

The Positions section of an MT5 report is considerably richer than the on-screen tab. The columns:

Open Time, Ticket, Symbol, Type, Volume, Open Price, S/L, T/P, Close Time, Close Price, Commission, Swap, Profit, Profit Points, Balance, Magic Number, Duration, Open Reason, Close Reason, Open Comment, Close Comment, Deal Tickets.

Three of those are worth more than traders realise:

Duration is already computed. You do not need to subtract timestamps. This makes "how long do my winners run compared to my losers?" a sorting exercise rather than a spreadsheet project, and it is one of the few genuinely diagnostic questions the export can answer on its own.

Open Reason and Close Reason tell you how the position ended: hit the stop, hit the target, or closed by hand. That is the most underused column in the file. Count how many of your losses were actual stop-outs versus manual exits, and how many of your winners you closed early rather than letting reach the target. If most of your losers were closed by hand before the stop, your problem is not your stop placement.

Magic Number separates automated trades from manual ones. If you run any EA alongside discretionary trading, filtering on this before you compute anything is the difference between measuring your own performance and measuring an average of you and a robot.

Exporting From MT4

MT4 is simpler because it has fewer choices, and it has no positions-versus-deals problem at all: every row is a closed trade.

Open the Terminal with Ctrl+T, go to Account History, right-click inside the tab and choose your period. Pick All History for a full backfill, which is the step people skip before wondering why only last month exported.

Right-click again and choose Save as Detailed Report. You get an HTML statement in three blocks: Closed Transactions, Open Trades and Working Orders.

The closed-transactions table gives you Ticket, Open Time, Type, Size, Item, Price, S/L, T/P and Close Time, followed by the cost and result columns. "Item" is MT4's word for the symbol and "Size" is the lot size, which trips up column mapping later.

The plain Save as Report gives the same trade table. The detailed version adds a summary underneath with gross profit, gross loss, profit factor, expected payoff, drawdown figures and consecutive win and loss streaks. Take the detailed one. It costs nothing extra and the summary is a useful sanity check against whatever your journal computes later.

What the File Will Never Contain

Now the honest part, and the reason the export feels thinner than you hoped.

MetaTrader is an execution platform. It recorded, with perfect accuracy, what happened. It recorded nothing about why, because nobody asked it to.

1. Why you took the trade. No setup name, no conditions, no confluences. The file knows you bought EUR/USD at 09:14. It has no idea whether that was your A+ setup or boredom. This is the one that matters most, because "which of my setups actually makes money" is the question a journal exists to answer, and the export cannot contribute a single column toward it.

2. The chart. No screenshot, no drawing, no marked levels. Six months later the row tells you the trade lost 180 dollars and nothing about whether the entry was reasonable and the market simply went the other way, or whether you had no business being in it.

3. Whether you followed your own rules. There is no column for "waited for confirmation" or "risked more than 1%". Rule adherence is only measurable if you record the rule check at the time, which is exactly what a discipline score does and exactly what no broker statement can reconstruct afterwards.

4. Your original stop. This one is subtle and worth staring at. The export has one S/L column, holding one value. If you moved your stop, that value is the last one, so a stop widened mid-trade to avoid a loss leaves no trace. The file cannot distinguish "my plan was a 20 pip stop and it worked" from "my plan was a 20 pip stop, I moved it to 60, and I got out at 45". Those are opposite behaviours that produce identical rows.

There is a related gap in the Profit column: it is in currency, not in R. The terminal never knew what you intended to risk, so it cannot express a result as a multiple of it. Converting to R is the single most valuable thing you can do to an exported history, and it needs a number that only you have.

What You Can Genuinely Compute From an Export

Not nothing. Worth being precise about the split, because plenty of people conclude the file is useless and it is not.

From the export alone, honestly:

• Win rate, average win, average loss, and from those your expectancy and profit factor
• Performance by symbol, and how much of your result comes from one instrument
• Performance by hour and by weekday, using Open Time
• Hold time patterns, from Duration, including whether losers are held longer than winners
• How trades ended, from Close Reason
• Costs, from Commission and Swap, and whether they are quietly eating a scalping strategy

What no amount of spreadsheet work extracts:

• Which setup or confluence is responsible for the edge
• Whether a losing month was bad trading or bad markets
• Whether you followed your process
• What you were thinking

The first list is your baseline. It is real, it is worth computing, and most traders have never done it. The second list is why you journal going forward rather than only exporting backward.

Getting It Into a Journal Cleanly

If the plan is to import the file, three practical things.

Strip the file down first. A MetaTrader report is a document, not a data table. There is an account header block above the trades and a summary block below, and both will confuse an importer that expects the first row to be column headers. Delete everything except the trade table, then save as CSV.

Watch the S/L column. MT4 and MT5 both label the stop column "S/L" and put a price level in it, not a pip distance. Mapping it into a field that expects pips silently stores a price where a distance belongs, and every risk calculation downstream inherits the error. In TradingSFX's importer this is handled explicitly: "S/L" and "Stop Loss" map to a stop price, and only headers that actually say pips map to pips.

Know where Comment lands. MetaTrader's Comment column usually holds a strategy tag or an EA name, so our importer maps it to the Strategy field rather than Notes. If yours holds something else, remap it at the preview step. The column mapping flow is walked through in quick logging and CSV import.

One limit to state plainly: the free Basic plan caps you at 10 trades a month, and imported trades count against that cap like any other. A one-off backfill of a year of history is a paid-plan operation. It will not silently truncate, it stops and tells you.

The Workflow That Actually Works

Exporting is the right tool for exactly one job, and the wrong tool for the job most people try to use it for.

Use the export to backfill. History from before you started journaling, or from a broker you have left, exists in exactly one place and this is how you get it. Do it once, map it carefully, and you start with a real sample instead of an empty account.

Do not use the export as your weekly routine. Repeating the export, strip, save, map cycle every Sunday is a chore, and chores are what kill journaling habits around week five. For trades going forward, an Expert Advisor pushes closed trades across as they happen. It runs on your own terminal, never asks for a password, and cannot place or modify an order. The three available mechanisms and what each one asks of you are compared in auto-importing MT4 and MT5 trades. Automatic import is a Pro and Premium feature.

Add the reasoning at the time. This is the part no import solves. Whatever fills your journal automatically, the setup, the screenshot and the rule check have to be added while you still remember, because they were never in the terminal to begin with. The good news is that this takes about twenty seconds when the execution data is already there waiting for you.

And if the reason you are exporting history is to test a strategy rather than review one, exported candles are a different job from exported trades. Replaying bar by bar on MetaTrader is covered in MT5 bar replay backtesting.

Bottom Line

Export the Positions view, not Deals, or your trade count doubles and your win rate halves for no reason anyone will notice.

Take the extra columns. Duration, Close Reason and Magic Number are free and they answer real questions.

Then accept what the file is. It is a complete record of what you did and a blank page on why you did it. It will tell you that your Tuesdays are red and your losers are held twice as long as your winners, which is genuinely useful and more than most traders know about themselves.

It will not tell you which setup to stop trading. For that, something has to record the setup at the moment you take it. Connect MetaTrader so the execution data arrives on its own, and spend the twenty seconds you saved on the half the statement was never going to have.

Published August 17, 2026. MT5 History tab view modes, report export formats and the Positions report column list, plus MT4 Account History report options and columns, verified 17 August 2026 against MetaQuotes' MetaTrader 5 help pages, MetaTrader 4 help and platform release notes. MetaQuotes domains are blocked by our research environment's egress proxy, so figures come from indexed extracts of those official pages corroborated across independent searches. Menu wording varies slightly between platform builds and broker white-labels.