Connect MetaTrader 5

What this does

MetaTrader 5 is the terminal your broker gives you, not a broker in itself. Connect MT5 once and your broker is connected, whoever it is.

The two routes

The VEXA Sync Expert Advisor. A small program you drop into your desktop MetaTrader. On MT5 it sends each trade to VEXA as it closes, in real time, and runs a full reconciliation every six hours to catch anything that slipped through a busy moment. Start at Install the VEXA Sync Expert Advisor.

A report you export from your history. No install, no key. You repeat it whenever you want VEXA up to date.

Running the Expert Advisor and uploading one export for your back history covers both.

Before you start

• The Expert Advisor is desktop only. Mobile MetaTrader cannot run custom Expert Advisors. See MetaTrader setup needs a desktop.
• Set your broker server timezone first. MT5 servers run on their own clock and VEXA’s default assumes GMT+2. See Set your broker server timezone.
• VEXA needs the Deals view. Positions and Orders are summaries; only Deals carries the fill-level detail VEXA reconstructs trades from.
• Forex, stocks, futures, options and crypto are all supported.
• Quantities are shown in lots. One lot is 100,000 units of the base currency.

Steps

Deals, not Positions or Orders

The three views look similar and only one of them works. Positions shows net results, Orders shows instructions, and neither carries the individual fills. Export either of those and VEXA has nothing to reconstruct, which surfaces as “No trades were found in this file”.

Hedging accounts

On a hedging account, opposing buys and sells in the same symbol are kept as separate positions rather than being netted against each other, which is what your broker does too. Two positions opened in the same second on the same symbol stay two trades in VEXA, because each carries its own MetaTrader position id.

Limits and gotchas

• The wrong timezone shifts every trade onto the wrong day and into the wrong session.
• All History or nothing. The default period in the History tab is short.
• MT5 exports are often UTF-16. VEXA handles that. What breaks it is opening the file in Excel and saving it again, so upload the file the terminal produced.
• The Expert Advisor only runs while MetaTrader is open. Trades closed with the terminal shut arrive the next time you open it.
• Swap is handled as a signed amount, so a swap credit reduces your cost rather than adding to it.
• If your figures do not reconcile with your terminal, re-import. Re-importing never duplicates, so checking is free. See Re-upload files without creating duplicates.

What you should see

Expert Advisor: the EA connection card on the MetaTrader page in VEXA turns green with a last sync measured in seconds.

Export: a result panel naming an MT5 format, with a count of closed trades. Check one trade against the terminal, including the time and the profit, before you upload years of history.

If it doesn’t work

• “No trades were found in this file.” You exported Positions or Orders instead of Deals.
• Every trade is on the wrong day. The broker server timezone is wrong. Fix it and re-import.
• A hedged pair looks merged into one trade. Report it with the symbol and the timestamps. Two positions with distinct MetaTrader position ids should never be merged.
• The Expert Advisor is installed and nothing arrives. See MetaTrader troubleshooting.