The problem nobody writes about
Search for how to export your trades and you will find the same four clicks reproduced on twenty sites, all copied from the platform's own help page. What none of them mention is that the same terminal can produce several different files, they are not interchangeable, and the one most people export first is usually the wrong one.
MetaTrader 5 alone offers a positions report, a deals report and an orders report. They describe different things: a position is the round trip you think of as "a trade", a deal is each individual fill, and an order is an instruction that may never have filled at all. Import the wrong one and your trade count can double, your P&L can be right while your win rate is nonsense, or you can end up with rows that have no result attached because they were never executed.
This section is written from the other side of that problem — from the code that reads these files. Each page says which columns the format carries, which ones are needed to reconstruct a trade, and where a specific export loses something.
What a journal actually needs from a file
Regardless of platform, reconstructing a trade takes six things:
- an identifier, so re-importing the same file does not duplicate everything
- the instrument
- direction — long or short
- size
- entry time and price
- exit time and price, or a clear marker that the position is still open
Everything else is a bonus, and two of those bonuses matter more than people expect.
Costs. Commission and swap are sometimes separate columns and sometimes already folded into a "net" figure. If a tool adds them again to a net number, every trade reads worse than it was; if it ignores them on a gross number, everything reads better. There is no way to tell which you have from the P&L column alone — only from which other columns are present.
Stop and target. MetaTrader exports carry S/L and T/P. This is rare and worth more than it looks: it is a record of what you intended, written before the outcome was known. Most platforms drop it, and most journals discard it even when it is there.
What no export contains
Some things are simply not in any statement file, and a tool that claims to measure them from an upload is guessing:
- Slippage — the difference between the price you asked for and the price you got. The file records the fill, never the request.
- Latency and spread at the moment of execution. Same reason.
- Whether you moved a stop. The export stores the final stop level. A stop that was widened mid-trade and then hit looks identical to one that was respected from the start.
These need a live connection to the terminal, not a file. It is worth knowing the boundary before you judge any journal — including this one — by what it says it can see.
A note on the click-paths
The steps on the pages below reflect the standard desktop builds. Brokers ship customised terminals, and menu labels move between versions, so treat the paths as a description of what to look for rather than a script to follow blind. The column lists are the part that stays reliable, because those come from the files themselves.