How to Export MT5 Trade History (and Get It Into a Trading Journal)
MetaTrader 5 keeps every trade you have taken, but getting that history into a spreadsheet or journal is not obvious. Here is the exact path, the gotchas, and the shortcut.
Profit AI Research · 7 min readTable of contents
There are three reasons to export MT5 history: moving to a new journal, auditing a prop firm challenge, or doing your own analysis in a spreadsheet. The terminal can do it, but the menu is hidden and the report needs a little cleanup first.
Exporting from MT5 desktop
- Open the Toolbox (View → Toolbox, or Ctrl+T) and select the History tab.
- Right-click inside the history and choose Positions. This groups fills into complete trades.
- Right-click again and pick the period: All History, Last 3 Months, or a Custom Period.
- Right-click once more, choose Report, then Open XML (MS Office Excel 2007). HTML also works if you prefer to open it in a browser.
Cleaning the report
The report is built for reading, not importing. It starts with account details, then lists Positions, Orders, and Deals, and ends with summary statistics. For a journal you want exactly one table.
- Keep the Positions header row (Time, Position, Symbol, Type, Volume, Price, S / L, T / P, Time, Price, Commission, Swap, Profit).
- Delete everything above that header and everything from the Orders section down.
- The two Time and Price columns are open and close. Rename them Open Time, Open Price, Close Time, and Close Price so nothing is ambiguous.
- Save as CSV (UTF-8). Check that numbers use a dot as the decimal separator if your spreadsheet is set to a different locale.
Importing into Profit AI
Choose Import a CSV in the journal. Profit AI detects known broker formats and maps columns automatically; if any column is not recognised, you map it by hand. You preview every row before saving, and re-importing the same file does not create duplicates.
MT4 is the same idea
In MT4, open the Account History tab, right-click to choose the period, then Save as Report (HTML) or Save as Detailed Report. Open the HTML file in Excel or Google Sheets, keep the closed-transactions table (it has Ticket, Open Time, Type, Size, Item, Price, S / L, T / P, Close Time, Price, Commission, Taxes, Swap, Profit), and save it as CSV.
The shortcut: sync MT5 instead
Exports are fine for a one-off. For a journal you keep using, you would repeat this every week. Profit AI syncs MT5 accounts directly with your account number, server, and investor password. That password is read-only by design: it can see history but cannot place trades. Prop firm accounts on MT5, such as FTMO, connect the same way.
Frequently asked questions
About the author
Profit AI ResearchTrading Research TeamProfit AI Research is the in-house team behind the analyses, journal models, and Trader Score methodology used by 200,000+ traders. The team combines active discretionary traders, quantitative researchers, and ML engineers focused on price action, market structure, and prop-firm risk modeling.
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