MT5 history balance rows: deposits and withdrawals are not trades

Balance rows can inflate your win rate and profit totals. See how to recognise them and keep your statistics clean.

Why your MT5 history has rows that are not trades

Open the History tab on a funded account and you will often see rows whose type is not Buy or Sell but Balance. These are balance operations: deposits, withdrawals and other adjustments made by the broker. They sit in the same table as your deals, with a profit figure that is really a cash movement. If you export the table, count the rows or total the profit column without separating them, and your trade statistics will be wrong.

This page shows how to recognise balance rows, where deposits and withdrawals are listed separately, and how to keep them out of win rate, profit factor and drawdown. Menu names and extra row types vary by broker, so treat the details as a guide and check your own terminal.

What a balance row looks like

Entry deals also show zero profit, because the result of a position is booked on the exit deal. That is a separate reason why a column total of profit can look odd until you filter by type.

Where deposits and withdrawals are listed

On the desktop terminal the Navigator can include a Payments section that lists funding transactions with a ticket, a date and the payment system. Not every broker uses it, and some funding goes through the broker’s own client portal instead, so the Payments list can be empty even on an account that has been funded. The summary line under the deals list also separates the sum of deposits and withdrawals from the profit total, which helps as a cross-check.

Types of balance row you may meet

• Deposit. Positive amount, usually with a payment reference.
• Withdrawal. Negative amount.
• Credit or bonus. Some brokers add credit as a separate operation. It may affect equity but not the balance in the same way, and the rules vary.
• Correction. A manual adjustment by the broker, with a comment.
• Commission or fee rows. Some brokers book fees as separate rows instead of in the commission column.
• Dividend or similar. On some CFD symbols, cash adjustments can appear as their own type.

If a row is something you do not recognise, ask the broker before you decide how to count it.

How balance rows distort your statistics

• Win rate. A deposit counted as a winning trade inflates it; a withdrawal counted as a loss deflates it.
• Average win and loss. A large deposit becomes the biggest win in the sample.
• Profit factor. Deposits added to gross profit and withdrawals to gross loss can swing the ratio.
• Drawdown and growth curves. A curve built from balance includes deposits as if they were profit. A growth curve of trading results should be built from trade results only, or the cash movements should be shown separately.
• Growth percentage. Return on a balance that was topped up during the month needs adjusting for the deposits.

The profit factor calculator and the win rate calculator assume the numbers you enter are trades only, so clean the list first.

A worked example (hypothetical)

A trader opens the month with $1,000, deposits $500 on the 10th and closes 20 positions with a net result of +$60. The balance at month end is $1,560. A quick look at the balance suggests +56%, but the trading result is +$60 on roughly $1,500 of capital, which is about 4% and depends on when the deposit arrived. If the history export is summed with the deposit row, the profit column totals $560 and the single deposit looks like the best trade of the month. Filtering the Type column to remove Balance rows leaves the 20 real positions.

A clean way to handle it

• Filter or sort the exported table by Type before you add anything up.
• Keep a separate list of deposits and withdrawals with dates, so that growth figures can be adjusted.
• Count closed positions, not deals. See MT5 deal, order and position IDs.
• Compare your trading total with the statement from the broker once a month.

AI Trading Journal builds its journal from closed positions in your MetaTrader 5 history, with partial closes combined and the result being profit plus commission plus swap, so the entries are trades rather than cash movements. If a broker books something unusual as a deal, compare the totals with your statement. The Progress page shows a growth curve and monthly table from those entries; the progress and goals page explains it.

Limits of this page

• Row types, names and the Payments list differ between brokers and builds.
• The example is invented. It is not a statement about returns.
• This is not tax or accounting advice; for records, see MT5 trade history for tax records.

A five-minute audit of your own statistics

If your win rate or total looks odd, check whether balance rows are in the calculation. This takes about five minutes and needs only the History tab and a calculator.

1. In the History tab, choose the period you care about and show Positions rather than Deals, so each trade is one line.
2. Add up the profit column twice: once for real trades only, and once including any line whose type is balance.
3. Compare the two totals with the figure on your broker’s statement or in the report you are using. The one that matches is the one the tool is calculating.
4. Count the lines in both versions. A spreadsheet that counts a deposit as a trade will show one more trade than you made.

The deposit adds $500 to the total and one line to the count, so both numbers are wrong for the question “how did my trading do?”. A journal that reads closed positions only, as AI Trading Journal does, never has this problem; a hand-built spreadsheet fed from a raw export often does.

Deposits are only one kind of non-trade row; see MT5 history rows that are not trades for charge, correction and dividend rows.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• A local trading journal for MT5
• P&L calendar for MT5
• Trade notes, ratings and screenshots
• Trading progress and goals
• Back up your journal and move it to a new PC
• An offline trading journal for Windows
• How to set monthly trading goals
• Import your whole MT5 history
• How to tag trades
• Trade screenshots for your journal
• All trading journal comparisons