MT5 copy trading and signals in your trade history

Trades you did not decide still land in your history. How to mark them and keep your own statistics honest.

MetaTrader 5 lets traders follow other traders through signals and copy services, and lets providers publish their own. If trades reach your account that way, they land in your history like any other, and that raises a question for a journal: whose decision was it? A record of results is not a record of your own decision making. This page explains what to expect in the history when copied trades are involved, and how to keep your analysis honest.

What copied trades look like in the history

A copied trade is an ordinary trade on your account. It opens, runs, and closes with a profit, commission and swap, just as one you placed by hand. The history does not tag it with the words “copied from X” in a way you can rely on. Some services add text in the comment field of the deal or the order, and some use a magic number, but the form depends on the service, the broker and the build. Check your own history rather than assuming.

Two things are worth looking at on a sample of trades: the comment column and the magic number. How the second one works is explained in magic numbers in the trade history, and the comment field in history comments: sl, tp and so. If neither tells you the source, you will have to add the information yourself.

Why you should not blend them

If copied trades and your own are analysed together, the combined win rate and profit factor describe neither. You learn nothing about your own skill, and you also learn nothing clean about the provider, because your account has a different size, different costs and a different timing. Slippage and delay between the provider’s fill and yours also change the result, for better or worse.

• Tag every copied trade the moment you notice it.
• Analyse your own trades and the copied ones separately for at least a month.
• Check delay and cost: how far your fill was from what you believed the provider got is a useful number, but you have to keep your own record of it, because the history keeps only your side.
• Note any trade where you closed early or added to the position yourself. That is your decision and belongs in your own review.

What a journal can and cannot do here

AI Trading Journal creates one entry per closed position on the account you connect. It does not know whether a trade was copied, automated or manual, and it does not record the provider’s price or intended entry. What it gives you is a place to add the tag, a note and a rating after the fact, and a filter that lets you view the tagged groups separately. For trades that came from an Expert Advisor rather than a person, the same approach applies; see also Expert Advisor vs app for how the two differ in what they do.

The app is read-only. It does not copy, place, modify or close any trade, and it has nothing to do with the signal service itself.

Questions to answer in your notes

• Why did I follow this provider, and what would make me stop?
• How large is my position compared with what I would choose on my own?
• Did I move a stop, close early or add size on a copied trade? What was the reason?
• Would I have taken this entry myself? An honest answer separates skill you have from skill you rent.

A weekly routine for copied trades

Once a week, take ten minutes with the tagged group. Count how many copied trades closed, read the comment text for any change in how the service labels its orders, and compare the closing times with what you expected. If the provider changed style, for example holding trades much longer than before, you want to notice it from your own records rather than from a surprise drawdown. Also note any day when your terminal was offline or the connection failed, since a gap can make a copied position open late or close at a different time than the provider’s.

Finally, write one sentence that answers a simple question: would I still follow this service if I judged it only by this week’s notes? The sentence takes seconds and, over months, builds a record of your own reasoning about the decision to copy at all.

A worked example (hypothetical)

A trader follows a signal provider on a live account and also trades by hand. After two months the account shows a small profit overall, and the trader assumes the hand-placed trades are working. Filtering by the copied tag shows that all of the profit came from the copied trades, while the hand-placed ones were roughly flat after costs. The decision that follows is the trader’s own, but it is now based on separated data. The numbers in this scenario are invented to demonstrate the method.

Limits of this page

• The way a service marks copied trades in comments or magic numbers varies; verify in your own history.
• This page does not evaluate any signal provider or recommend one.
• The app does not record whether a trade was copied; the tag is manual.

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