MT5 trade holding time: how to measure and review it

How long do your winners and losers stay open? Read it from your MetaTrader 5 history and group it into buckets.

Why holding time deserves its own look

Most reviews start with profit and loss, win rate and the symbol. Few look at how long trades stay open, yet the holding time often explains a pattern that the other numbers hide. A trader who cuts winners after two minutes and lets losers run for two hours can have a fine-looking win rate and a poor result, and the clock is the clue. This page shows how to read holding time from your MetaTrader 5 history, how to summarise it, and what it can and cannot tell you.

Where the times come from

The history in the desktop terminal can be shown as positions, orders or deals. In the positions view, each row has an open time and a close time, so the holding time is the close minus the open. The deals view has one row per execution, so a position that was closed in two parts has two exit times. Both views use the broker’s server clock, not your local time; read the page on MT5 server time if the hours look odd. Tab names and menus differ a little between builds, so check your own terminal.

If you export the history to a spreadsheet (see how to export MT5 trade history), the open and close columns arrive as text or dates depending on the format. A simple subtraction in a spreadsheet then gives days, which you can multiply by 24 or 1,440 for hours or minutes.

Partial closes change the answer

When you close half of a position early and the rest later, the holding time depends on what you count. The first exit and the last exit can be hours apart. The convention used in this site’s journal is one entry per closed position, dated by the last exit; a holding time that uses the first open and the last close covers the whole life of the position, while the average time of each part would be shorter. Whichever you choose, use it for every trade, and read deal, order and position IDs explained to see how the pieces are linked.

Buckets that make the numbers readable

Raw durations are hard to compare, so group trades into buckets. The choice depends on your style. A scalper might use under one minute, one to five minutes, five to fifteen and over fifteen. A swing trader might use under four hours, four to twenty-four hours, one to three days and longer. The table shows a layout and an invented result so you can see what to expect from the exercise.

These figures are made up. In this imaginary month the trader’s sweet spot is the middle two buckets and the shortest and longest trades cost money. A real table could say anything, including that the sample is too small to conclude.

Winners versus losers

A second cut is the average holding time of winners against losers. If losers stay open much longer than winners, you may be hoping rather than following a rule. If winners are far shorter, you may be taking profit early; the page on cutting winners early looks at that habit. Neither is proof of a mistake, since a strategy can legitimately close winners quickly, but the gap is worth a note in your review.

What holding time does not tell you

• It does not say why you held. A long loser may have been a plan or a failure to act.
• It does not include the time a pending order waited before it filled, unless you add that yourself.
• It is affected by the weekend gap and by swap rollover, so multi-day numbers include time the market was closed.
• Small samples mislead. A bucket with three trades is a story, not a statistic.

A worked example (hypothetical)

A trader reviews forty trades from one month in a spreadsheet. The average holding time of winners is 22 minutes and of losers 71 minutes. The trader checks the notes for the three longest losers and finds each has the entry reason “waiting for it to come back”. The month’s review rule becomes: if a trade is open for longer than twice the typical winner and the setup has not changed, close it and write why. The following month the trader looks again at the same table. The example is invented and shows a method rather than a result.

Using a journal for it

AI Trading Journal reads each closed position from your MetaTrader 5 history and records its times, symbol, size and result, and you can filter by tag, symbol and period and open the Excel report, which includes net P&L by close hour, weekday and symbol. It dates each entry by the last exit on the broker’s server clock. It does not draw a holding-time chart for you, so if holding time is your question, export the report and add the subtraction yourself. For the other time-based views, see the P&L calendar page.

Limits of this page

• Menu names vary by build; check your own terminal.
• The tables use invented numbers and show no real performance.
• Server time differs from your local time and from other brokers.
• Holding time is one lens among many and is not advice to trade any particular way.

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