Reading a MetaTrader Account Statement: Fields That Mislead
A trader exports three months of history, adds up the Profit column, and gets a number that does not match the account balance. Nothing is broken. The column was never meant to be summed on its own, and on one of the two platforms it does not even hold what most people assume it holds.
A MetaTrader statement is a record produced to a fixed specification, and the specification decides what each field counts. What follows works through the fields where the specification and the intuition point in different directions.
Key takeaways
- MT4 and MT5 do not produce the same document. MT4 writes one flat table of operations; the MT5 report is split into Orders, Deals, Positions and Working Orders because the platform treats those as different objects.
- MT5 nets commission, fees and swap into each deal before deciding whether it counts as profitable, so the profit and loss trade counts on that report are already after costs.
- MT4 does the opposite. Commission, Taxes and Swap sit in their own columns beside Profit, so adding up Profit alone leaves the costs out.
- Deposits and withdrawals appear inside the MT4 trade table as operations of type Balance, which is the usual reason a manual total does not reconcile.
- The stop-loss and take-profit columns show a level whether or not it ever triggered. Only the coloured cell and the s/l or t/p comment identify the order that actually closed the position.
- The preset history ranges select trades by close time, so a position opened before the window but closed inside it is included, and one still open is not there at all.
Table of contents
- What the Statement Is and What It Is Not
- Where MT4 and MT5 Diverge
- The Cost Fields That Decide Whether a Trade Counts as a Win
- Balance Entries Sitting Inside the Trade Table
- Reading the Stop-Loss and Take-Profit Columns
- The Summary Block, Field by Field
- What This Report Cannot Tell You
- Frequently Asked Questions
What the Statement Is and What It Is Not
The statement is an export of what the account did, generated from a template the platform ships with. It is a record of executed operations and of the account state at the moment it was produced.
What it is not is an analysis. Every figure in it is descriptive, and the summary values are arithmetic performed on the rows above them rather than a judgement about whether the approach works.
That distinction matters because the report contains figures that look evaluative. A profit factor and an average result per trade read like verdicts. They are summaries of a sample, and they carry the limits of the sample they came from, which is the same caution that applies when reading a result without borrowed thresholds.
Where MT4 and MT5 Diverge
Most descriptions treat the two platforms as one workflow with a different menu path. The documents they produce are built on different models.
MT4 records a single table of trade operations. Each row is an operation with an opening time and price, a closing time and price, and the costs and result beside them.
MT5 separates what MT4 combines. Its report is divided into blocks: Orders, Deals, Positions and Working Orders, each carrying the fields available in the matching terminal tab. An order is an instruction, a deal is an execution, and a position is the resulting exposure. One order can produce several deals, and several deals can build or reduce one position.
This is why a row count on an MT5 report rarely equals the number of trades in the ordinary sense. The Deals block counts executions, not decisions. The same object model is what governs how MT5 models positions, and the report simply exposes it.
| Question you are asking of the file | MT4 | MT5 |
|---|---|---|
| How the records are organised | One table of trade operations | Separate Orders, Deals, Positions and Working Orders blocks |
| Where commission and swap appear | Separate Commission, Taxes and Swap columns beside Profit | Netted into the per-deal result before it is classified |
| Whether a win count is before or after costs | Depends on whether you add the cost columns yourself | After costs, by the definition the platform applies |
| Export formats offered | Report or detailed report, the detailed one adding further parameters | Report generated from the platform template |
The Cost Fields That Decide Whether a Trade Counts as a Win
This is the field-level difference with the largest effect on any conclusion drawn from the file.
On MT5 the total result of a deal is calculated as the profit or loss, less commission, less fees, less swap. A deal is then treated as profitable when that total is above zero and as a losing deal when it is below. The classification happens after costs, not before.
The consequence follows directly. A trade that gained on price but paid more in commission and swap than it gained is recorded as a losing deal, and every count built on that classification inherits it. The proportion of profitable trades on an MT5 report is a post-cost figure.
MT4 splits the same information across columns instead. Commission holds what the broker charged, Taxes holds any tax charged on the operation, Swap holds the financing, and Profit holds the financial result of the transaction expressed in the deposit currency.
So the same question gets a different answer on each platform, which is the trap. A win rate taken from an MT5 report and a win rate computed by counting positive Profit cells on an MT4 export are not the same measurement, and the second one is flattered by every cost sitting in a neighbouring column. The general arithmetic of costs turning a gross gain into a net loss is worked through with figures in our profit and loss calculator.
Balance Entries Sitting Inside the Trade Table
The MT4 Type column carries only three values: Balance, Buy and Sell. Balance is the entry of funds into the account.
Deposits and withdrawals therefore sit as rows in the same table as trades, with the amount landing in the Profit column because that is the column holding the financial result of the operation.
This single fact explains most reconciliation failures. Selecting the Profit column and taking a total adds every deposit to the trading result, and a single funding event can be larger than a quarter of trading. A total that looks impossible usually is.
The fix is to filter on the Type column before totalling anything, and to treat Balance rows as cash movements that belong outside any performance figure.
Reading the Stop-Loss and Take-Profit Columns
These two columns are read as a record of how each trade ended. They are not one.
The columns show the level that was set. A level that was placed but never reached still appears, and a zero appears only where no order was placed at all. Presence in the column establishes that a level existed, not that it did anything.
What identifies the order that actually closed the position is the formatting. Where a stop-loss closed the trade the cell is coloured red and an s/l marker is written into the comments field; where a take-profit closed it the cell is coloured green and a t/p marker appears. Without the colour and the marker, the level in the cell is one that sat unused.
Comments are worth a second look for a related reason. A comment can only be entered when a position is opened or an order is placed, and it cannot be changed afterwards, though the broker may also write into that field. So a comment is either something recorded at entry or something the firm added, and it is the field where an s/l or t/p marker will be found.
The Summary Block, Field by Field
The MT5 report closes with account-level values and then a details block of computed statistics. The account-level ones are definitional: balance excludes the result of open positions, equity includes it, margin is what is held against open positions, free margin is what remains, and margin level expresses equity against margin as a percentage.
The computed block is where care is needed. Gross profit is the sum of the deals whose total came out above zero, gross loss the sum of those below, and net profit the result of all of them. Because those totals use the post-cost per-deal figure, every statistic built on them is post-cost too.
Profit factor compares gross profit against gross loss, and the platform documentation notes that a value of one means the two are equal. It is a ratio between two sums, so a single large result on either side moves it, and it says nothing about the order the results arrived in.
Expected payoff is the statistically calculated average result of one deal across the sample. It is an average of what happened, and it describes the sample rather than settling what the next trade will do.
The remaining fields count and rank: total trades, short and long trades with the won percentage for each, profitable and losing trades as a share of the total, the largest and average result on each side, and the longest runs of consecutive wins and losses with their totals.
Drawdown has its own set of figures on the same report. Because the platform prints several of them under different definitions, they are covered separately in our page on the drawdown figures on the same report.
What This Report Cannot Tell You
The preset ranges select by close time. Choosing the last month requests orders by when they closed, so a position opened in March and closed in April belongs to April, and a position still open is not in the history at all. A quiet month in the file can be a month where everything stayed open.
The report also carries no record of what was intended. It shows the level that was set and the price that was reached, never the decision behind either, so a stop that was moved and a stop that held look identical once the trade is closed. That gap is why a separate record of intent is worth keeping alongside the export, and why order entry in MetaTrader is worth understanding as its own subject.
And it describes one account over one window. Nothing in it establishes that the pattern continues, and a short sample can produce a flattering profit factor from a handful of results.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a MetaTrader statement count commission and swap inside the trade result?
On MT5 yes. The total for a deal is the profit or loss less commission, less fees and less swap, and that total is what decides whether the deal is recorded as profitable or losing. MT4 keeps Commission, Taxes and Swap as separate columns beside Profit, so on an MT4 export the costs are present but are not inside the Profit figure.
Why does the profit column include deposits on MT4?
Because funding is recorded as a trade operation. The MT4 Type column holds three values, Balance, Buy and Sell, and Balance is the entry of funds into the account. Those rows sit in the same table as trades and their amount lands in the same result column, so totalling that column without filtering on Type mixes cash movements into the trading figure.
Is the MT4 statement the same as the MT5 trading report?
No. MT4 produces one flat table of trade operations. The MT5 report is divided into Orders, Deals, Positions and Working Orders because the platform treats an instruction, an execution and the resulting exposure as three different objects. A count of rows therefore means something different on each, and the two files are not directly comparable line for line.
What does profit factor on the report actually compare?
It compares the sum of the deals that finished above zero against the sum of those that finished below, and the platform documentation notes that a value of one means the two are equal. Because both sums are built from per-deal totals that already have costs removed, the ratio is a post-cost one, and a single large result on either side can move it considerably.
Can a statement be saved for a period other than the default?
Yes. Alongside the preset ranges there is a custom period option where a start and end date can be set, and the full history can be requested as well. Whichever range is chosen, the orders are selected by their close time, so a trade that closed inside the window is included even if it opened long before it.
Sources checked 3 August 2026: MetaQuotes, MetaTrader 5 Help, Trading Report, for the division of the report into header, orders, deals, positions, working orders, summary and details blocks, for the per-deal total being the profit or loss less commission, fees and swap and for that total deciding whether a deal is profitable or losing, for the definitions of gross profit, gross loss, total net profit, profit factor and expected payoff, and for the account-level balance, equity, margin, free margin and margin level definitions. MetaQuotes, MetaTrader 4 Help, Account History, for the column list including the separate Commission, Taxes and Swap fields, for the Profit field holding the financial result in the deposit currency, for the Type field values Balance, Buy and Sell, for the stop-loss and take-profit cells showing an untriggered level and being coloured with an s/l or t/p comment only when they closed the position, for the rule that a comment can be entered only at opening and may also be written by the brokerage company, and for the history ranges requesting orders by close time together with the custom period, report and detailed report options. No figure on this page is taken from any commercial or educational site.
Disclaimer: This article is educational only, is not investment advice, and is not a recommendation to trade any instrument or use any platform. Platform behaviour varies with the build and with broker-side settings, so the report produced by a specific account should be checked against its own documentation. Trading leveraged instruments carries risk and losses can reach the full amount committed.