MetaTrader History Export Not Importing: The Report Problem

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Page updated September 2026

What is actually inside the file

An MT5 history export contains, in order: a title line naming the report, a block of account details, then a Positions table, then an Orders table, then a Deals table. Each has its own header row in the middle of the file. Only the Positions table holds closed round trips, one per row with an open time, a close time, both prices and a stated profit. Orders lists what you asked the broker to do. Deals lists individual executions, so a single trade appears twice. Read Orders or Deals as if they were round trips and you do not get zero trades, you get invented ones, which is worse.

Why this is fixed by shape and not by words

MT5 translates every column name into the terminal's language. We have real uploads from this exact failure in English and in Chinese, where the header reads 时间, 成交, 交易品种, 类型. Matching on words would support only the languages we happened to have a file for, so the parser matches on shape instead. In the Positions header the word for Time appears twice, once for open and once for close, and so does the word for Price. That pair of repeated columns is what identifies the Positions table, in any language, and is also what separates it from the Orders and Deals tables sitting in the same file. Your terminal's language does not matter.

MetaTrader 4, and the broker statement variant

MT4 and the many broker portals built on it usually export a flatter file, one row per closed trade, with headers along the lines of Ticket, Symbol, Type, Lots, Open Time, Open Price, Close Time, Close Price, Swaps, Commission, Profit. That shape imports directly. The variant that fails is the printed statement, which opens with the broker's name in the very first cell. When that happens the column names come out as junk and nothing lines up. If your file starts with your broker's name rather than with column names, look for an export or download button on the trade history page itself rather than the statement or report button.

Symbol suffixes and the number formats

Brokers append their own suffix to symbols, so the same instrument arrives as EURUSD, EURUSDm, USOILm or XAUUSD_ depending on who you trade with. Those are stripped so the instrument still matches. Numbers in these reports also arrive with a space as the thousands separator and sometimes a space after the minus sign, as in 63 490.50 and - 0.75. Both are handled. If a symbol still comes back unmatched, the import tells you which one and how many rows it affected rather than silently dropping them, which is what used to happen.

cTrader, Exness and the other web terminals

Exports from cTrader and from broker web terminals built on it use their own column naming, typically ticket, opening_time_utc, closing_time_utc, type, lots, symbol, opening_price, closing_price. Those route to the same MetaTrader parser and import normally. The one to avoid is the partial export that carries an opening time but no closing time, because those rows are positions still open. As everywhere else in this cluster: if there is no exit on the row, there is no finished trade in it.