Home / Blog

How to read your MT4 or MT5 statement, field by field

A MetaTrader statement has four blocks — a header, the trade rows, a closed-P&L summary, and a statistics block — and this walks all four, field by field. Have your own file open while you read: export an MT4 statement or an MT5 report first if you don't have one handy.

The four blocks of a statement

• The header — who the account belongs to and what period the file covers.
• The trade rows — one line per closed trade (MT4) or per deal (MT5).
• The closed-P&L block — a short summary of balance, equity and margin as of the statement date.
• The statistics block — the aggregate numbers: profit factor, drawdown, streaks and more.

The blocks build on each other in order: the header tells you whether you are even looking at the right slice of history, the trade rows are the raw material everything else is computed from, the closed-P&L block is a snapshot at the moment the file was generated, and the statistics block is every aggregate figure derived from the trade rows above it. Read them out of order and a statistic can look wrong when the actual problem is upstream, in a header date range that didn't cover what you thought it did.

The header

Account number, name on the account, broker, deposit currency, leverage, and the report's own date range. Check that date range against what you meant to export before reading anything else — it is the same trap covered in both export guides: a statement generated without All History selected first covers only a slice of your account, and every number below it describes that slice, not your real history.

The trade rows, column by column

The rows that aren't trades

Deposits, withdrawals and credits appear in the same list as closed trades, but they are not trades — a deposit has no S/L, no T/P, no open price the way a real position does. Leaving them in a naive drawdown or return calculation corrupts both figures: a $5,000 deposit arriving mid-month reads as a spectacular, impossible single-trade profit if a parser doesn't recognise it for what it is, and quietly flattens a real drawdown the same way a withdrawal quietly deepens one that never actually happened in trading terms.

The closed-P&L block

A short summary as of the statement date: Closed Trade P/L (the sum of every closed trade's profit column), Floating P/L (unrealised profit or loss on anything still open when the statement was generated), Margin (funds currently committed to open positions), Balance and Equity (see balance vs equity for the full distinction — balance is closed trades only, equity adds the floating P/L), and Free Margin (equity minus used margin, the amount left to open a new position before a margin call becomes a risk).

The statistics block, term by term

MetaQuotes' own terminology, checked directly against the current help documentation rather than older forum threads, which contain known errors specifically about relative drawdown:

• Gross Profit — the sum of every profitable trade's result, in account currency.
• Gross Loss — the sum of every unprofitable trade's result, in account currency.
• Total Net Profit — Gross Profit minus Gross Loss, the account's overall result.
• Profit Factor — Gross Profit divided by Gross Loss. MetaQuotes' own help text describes this "in percent," which is a well-known translation quirk in the official documentation rather than how the figure is actually shown — on the statement itself it appears as a plain ratio, such as 2.20, not a percentage.
• Expected Payoff — the average profit or loss per trade across the whole history; see the FAQ below for the full explanation.
• Absolute Drawdown — the largest drop below your account's starting deposit value, specifically measured from that original starting point rather than from any later peak.
• Maximal Drawdown — the largest drop, in currency, from a local high point in equity down to the next low point, anywhere in the history.
• Relative Drawdown — that same worst drop expressed as a percentage of the peak it fell from, rather than in currency. The full drawdown deep dive covers why these three numbers routinely disagree with each other and with what a trader intuitively expects "drawdown" to mean.
• Total Trades — the count of closed trade positions in the statement.
• Short/Long Positions (won %) — how many of each direction you took, and what share of each direction was profitable.
• Largest profit/loss trade — the single best and single worst trade by result, in currency.
• Average profit/loss trade — Gross Profit divided by the number of winning trades, and Gross Loss divided by the number of losing trades, respectively.
• Maximum consecutive wins/losses — the longest unbroken streak of winning or losing trades, and the total result of that streak.
• Average consecutive wins/losses — the typical streak length across every winning or losing run in the history, not just the longest one.

See every one of these worked out on your own statement: the MT4 statement analyzer.

Reading a statistics block together

A hypothetical statistics block, invented to show how the fields connect rather than copied from any real account: 45 total trades, 26 won. Gross Profit $3,200, Gross Loss $1,800. Total Net Profit is the difference, $1,400. Profit Factor is Gross Profit divided by Gross Loss, 1.78 — comfortably above the 1.0 line where an account stops losing money overall, though still worth reading alongside the win rate rather than alone. That win rate, 26 of 45, is 57.8%, a number that on its own says nothing about whether the wins were bigger or smaller than the losses, which is exactly why Profit Factor and the average profit/loss figures exist as separate lines rather than being folded into one. None of these four numbers can be worked out from the others; each is measuring something the rest do not.

What's different on an MT5 report

MT5 records deals rather than round-turn trades — an opening deal and a closing deal for every position, plus an extra deal for each partial close, rather than the single row MT4 gives you per trade. The statistics block also carries two figures MT4's does not: Recovery Factor (the ratio of total profit to maximum drawdown — a higher number means the account recovers from a drawdown faster relative to how deep it fell) and Sharpe Ratio (a measure of risk-adjusted return: the average profit per trade relative to how much that profit varies trade to trade — a negative Sharpe Ratio means the strategy was unprofitable over the period measured). Drawdown itself is split into Balance Drawdown (based on closed trades only, the same way MT4's maximal/relative drawdown is) and Equity Drawdown (which also reflects floating losses on positions still open when a low point occurred, tick by tick) — each reported in both currency and percentage terms, the same absolute-vs-relative split MT4 uses for its own drawdown figures.

See it worked out on your own report: the MT5 report analyzer.

The five numbers to read first

• Trade count — below roughly 30 closed trades, treat every other number here as provisional.
• Profit factor — under 1.0 means the account lost money over the period, full stop, regardless of what any other figure says.
• Expectancy in R — a negative figure means the system loses money on average per trade, even if a lucky streak makes the raw profit total look fine right now.
• Maximum drawdown — read it as a percentage of the equity peak it fell from, not as a raw currency figure, or two accounts of very different sizes become impossible to compare honestly.
• The date range — a strong three-week stretch inside a losing six-month history tells a very different story than the same three weeks alone.

Why your numbers don't match your broker's portal

Four common reasons: a different date range between the statement you exported and whatever period the portal defaults to; open trades included in one view's equity but not in the other's closed-P&L figure; swap posted on a different day than you expect if your broker times rollover differently from how you assumed; and commission netted into the trade row on one view but shown as a separate ledger line on the other. None of these mean either number is wrong — they are usually just measuring slightly different things.

A fifth reason, worth ruling out first whenever the gap is large rather than a rounding-sized difference: the statement was exported without All Historyselected, and covers a slice of the account rather than the whole thing. That one is always fixed the same way, by re-exporting with the full period selected, rather than by trying to reconcile two figures that were never describing the same trades in the first place.

Questions

The full metrics glossary ·Profit factor ·Expectancy ·Absolute drawdown ·Maximum drawdown ·Balance vs equity ·Export an MT4 statement ·Drawdown recovery calculator

This is educational information about measuring your own trading, not financial advice. Trading carries risk of loss. Full risk disclaimer.