Why your MT5 trade count does not match: positions versus deals

See why one account gives several trade counts, which unit to use for statistics and how to reconcile two totals.

You count your trades in MetaTrader 5 and get one number. A spreadsheet, a report or a journal gives another. Neither is necessarily wrong: they may be counting different things. The History tab can show positions, orders or deals, and one position can contain several deals and several orders. This page explains why the counts differ, how to decide what a trade is, and how to reconcile two totals when they should agree.

Three views, three counts

The platform separates a request (an order), an execution (a deal) and a running holding (a position). A simple market trade that opens and closes once involves two orders, two deals and one position. Add a partial close, a stop loss hit, or a scale-in and the numbers diverge quickly. The concepts are introduced on deal, order and position IDs.

The counts above describe typical cases; the exact numbers on your account also depend on whether it is hedging or netting, as described on hedging versus netting.

Why your totals disagree

• You counted deals while someone else counted positions. A trade with a partial close is two or more deals but one position.
• A report includes balance rows such as deposits and credits, while your count of trades does not; see non-trade rows in history.
• Pending orders that were cancelled or expired are orders but not trades; pending orders in history explains where they appear.
• The date window differs, for example one tool uses the opening time and another the closing time, so trades near a boundary fall into different months.
• On a netting account a position that is added to and then reduced is one running position, and a reversal closes one and opens another; see position reversal on netting accounts.

A reconciliation routine

Start by deciding what you call a trade. For most reviews the best unit is the closed position, because it has one result. Filter the History tab to the period you want, set the view to positions if your build offers it, and count the rows. Then count the deals marked as entering and the deals marked as exiting; if the numbers of entering deals and closed positions disagree, look for scale-ins. Finally remove balance rows from any total. When two tools still disagree, compare them by a single trade: pick one position that is easy to follow, and trace its deals in both.

A worked example (hypothetical)

A trader sees 24 rows in the Deals view for the week and says “24 trades”. A spreadsheet of positions shows 15. The explanation is that 9 rows are the second halves of partial closes and scale-ins, and 2 of the 24 are a deposit and a credit. Removing the 2 balance rows leaves 22 trade deals. Of these, 15 positions have one entering deal each and 15 closing deals, and 7 deals are extra partial exits or additions. Win rate based on 24 mixed rows would be meaningless; based on 15 positions it is well defined. The numbers are invented to show the counting logic.

Why it matters for statistics

Win rate, average win, average loss and profit factor all depend on what you call a trade. Counting each partial exit as its own trade can inflate your win rate, because a trader who takes small profits early produces many small wins and one larger loss. The measures on trading statistics make more sense per position.

AI Trading Journal is a Windows app for MetaTrader 5 only and read-only. It keeps one entry per closed position, with partial closes combined and dated by the last exit on the broker’s server clock, and the result is profit plus commission plus swap. That means its trade count matches the position view, not the deal view, so if you compare it with a deal count the two will differ by design. The journal file lives on your PC and Notion is an optional extra copy.

Limits and cautions

• Terminal builds label the views a little differently; use the names in your own window.
• A count says nothing about quality; a day with many small trades is not better or worse by number alone.
• All numbers here are hypothetical.

Writing down your counting rule

The simplest way to stop counting arguments is to write a one-line rule and keep it with your statistics: for example, “a trade is a closed position; partial closes are combined; balance rows and cancelled orders are excluded; the date is the last exit in server time.” With a rule like that, any tool you use, whether a spreadsheet, a report or a journal, can be checked against it, and a difference in totals becomes a question about which rule the tool follows rather than a mystery.

• Write the rule before you look at the results so that you do not bend it to flatter the numbers.
• Apply the same rule to winners and losers; counting partial exits separately only for profitable trades is a common and quiet bias.
• When you compare months, make sure each month used the same rule and the same time basis, especially around month ends and daylight saving changes; see daylight saving and your journal dates.
• Review the rule once a year and note any change, so older figures are not silently compared with newer ones.

If you scale in and out often, the gap between deal counts and position counts will be large, and the rule matters more. A trader who never scales may see almost identical totals either way, which is why the problem often appears only after a strategy changes.

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