MAE and MFE in MT5: what trade history cannot show you

Learn what the two excursion figures mean, how to estimate them from the chart and how to record them in your journal notes.

Traders who journal seriously often ask two questions about every trade: how far did price go against me before it worked, and how far did it go in my favour before I got out? Those two distances have names, maximum adverse excursion and maximum favourable excursion, usually shortened to MAE and MFE. They are useful for judging stop placement and exits, but they are not part of the MetaTrader 5 trade history. This page explains what MAE and MFE are, why the history cannot give them, how to estimate them by hand and what you can learn without a tool that records every tick.

What MAE and MFE mean

Maximum adverse excursion is the worst unrealised loss a trade showed while it was open, measured from the entry price. Maximum favourable excursion is the best unrealised profit it showed. Both are measured within the life of one trade and say nothing about where the trade finally closed. A winning trade can have a large MAE, which means it came close to the stop, and a losing trade can have a large MFE, which means it was in profit before it reversed. The pair describes the path, while the closing result only describes the end point.

Why the MT5 history does not contain them

The history lists deals: executions with a time, a price and a volume. For a simple trade you get an entry and an exit and nothing in between. What price did in the hours or days between the two is market data, held as bars and ticks, not as part of your account history. The platform also does not store the floating profit of a position as a time series. That is the reason you will not find an MAE column in the deals list, in an exported report or in a typical journal that reads only closed trades. The columns that do exist are described in the history columns explained.

How to estimate them by hand

Open the chart of the symbol and go to the time of the entry and the time of the exit, using the open and close times from the history; mind the server clock described in MT5 server time.
Read the lowest low and the highest high between the two timestamps on a small timeframe, such as one minute or five minutes, so that you do not miss a spike.
For a long trade, MAE is the entry price minus the lowest low, and MFE is the highest high minus the entry price. For a short trade the roles swap.
Convert the distances to points or pips, as in points, pips and pipettes, so that trades on different symbols can be compared.
Write the two numbers in the notes of the journal entry, next to the stop and the target you had planned.

Bid and ask prices differ by the spread, and the chart shows bid prices by default, so a long trade’s true adverse move includes the spread. For rough studies the difference is small, but on wide-spread symbols it can matter; see spread and slippage in history.

What you can learn from the pair

Pattern	What it may suggest	Question to ask
Winners often have a MAE close to the stop	Stops may be tight or entries early	Would a slightly better entry have kept the same idea?
Losers often have a large MFE first	Exits may be too late or targets too far	Would a partial exit have helped?
Winners close far below their MFE	Profits may be given back	What was I thinking at the peak?
Few trades come near the stop before working	Stop distance may be comfortable	Is the size of the stop wasted risk?

These are prompts for review, not rules. A sample of ten trades cannot prove a pattern, and the market conditions can change from one week to the next. Use the pair together with the R-multiple view of your results, as in the risk to reward calculator and the expectancy calculator.

A worked example (hypothetical)

A trader buys at 100.00 with a stop at 99.00 and a target at 102.00. Reading the chart afterwards, the lowest low during the trade was 99.30 and the highest high was 101.60. The trade closed at 101.40. The MAE is 0.70, which is 70 percent of the stop distance, so the trade came uncomfortably close to the stop. The MFE is 1.60 against a planned 2.00 target, and the exit at 101.40 captured 1.40 of that. A note such as “MAE 70 percent of stop, MFE 1.6, exit 1.4” takes ten seconds to write and is easy to sort later. The numbers are invented.

Doing it without too much effort

Reviewing every trade on the chart is slow. A practical compromise is to do it for the trades you already flag for review, such as the largest losses, the best wins and the trades where the plan was not followed. The review routines in the weekly review checklist and the screenshots described in screenshots of MT5 trades fit this purpose, since a chart image taken at review time shows the path at a glance.

What the journal app does and does not do

AI Trading Journal, a Windows app for MetaTrader 5 only, reads closed trades on your own PC and keeps one entry per closed position with the result as profit plus commission plus swap. It does not calculate MAE or MFE, and it does not capture charts automatically. It does let you add notes, tags and screenshots to each entry, so the numbers you work out by hand have a place to live next to the trade. The app is read-only and the journal stays a file on your own computer.

Limits and cautions

Chart data can differ slightly between brokers, so MAE and MFE are estimates unless you use tick data.
A small timeframe is better than a large one for finding the true extremes.
Nothing here is trading advice; the example numbers are invented.

Frequently asked questions

What are MAE and MFE?

They are the worst unrealised loss and the best unrealised profit a trade showed while open, measured from the entry price.

Does MT5 show MAE or MFE?

No. The history lists deals with times and prices, not the path of price between entry and exit.

How can I estimate them?

Read the lowest low and highest high on a small timeframe chart between the entry and exit times and subtract from the entry price.

Does the journal app calculate them?

No. You can write your own figures in the notes of an entry.

Are small samples reliable?

No. A few trades can suggest a question but cannot prove a pattern.

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