The one thing your EA cannot tell you after it stops running

This is the ordinary version of a problem that has nothing to do with strategy. It is not about whether the EA is any good. It is about whether you can see what it did.

Advanced EA Monitor is a small panel that sits on the chart and answers that question. It watches one thing: the magic number your EA stamps on its trades. From that it builds a running picture — how many trades closed, how they split between winners and losers, what the net came to, what is currently floating.

The part that matters most is what happens when the EA is not there. Most monitors are attached to the EA, so when it goes, the display goes with it, taking the record with it at exactly the moment you need it. This one is attached to the magic number instead. The magic number identifies trades in your account history, and that history outlives whatever produced it. So the panel keeps reporting with no EA on the chart at all. It switches to manual refresh, tells you plainly that the EA is missing, and otherwise carries on. You get to do the post-mortem.

Seeing the trades, not just counting them

Numbers on a panel tell you the shape of a session. They do not tell you where in the price action it happened. Press [R] and the panel marks up the chart itself: an entry dot, an exit dot, a dotted path between them, and a small rounded balloon carrying the profit or loss.

The important detail is what it does not draw. The terminal's own trade history draws every deal on the symbol regardless of what produced it — so on a chart running more than one EA, or carrying your manual trades alongside, you get a picture of everything and can pick out nothing. This layer filters by the same magic number the panel is counting. If you are monitoring one EA, you see that EA's trades and nothing else.

On lower timeframes a busy session can produce a lot of markers, so the balloons group per chart bar. Zoom out and they consolidate on their own — the timeframe becomes the density control, with no setting to find.

The 365-day view

Underneath the current period sits a fixed year-long window: Profit Factor, best and worst trade, average win against average loss, expectancy per trade, the deepest closed drawdown, a per-trade consistency figure, and the longest runs of wins and losses.

These are deliberately kept separate from the period buttons above them. The upper block answers "how is today going". The lower one answers "is this thing actually working", and that question needs more than a day of evidence to be worth asking. It computes only when you ask it to, because scanning a year of history is not something to do on a timer.

What a cent account taught me

Here is the part I would rather not have learned the hard way.

Cent accounts report money multiplied by a hundred. A balance of $459 shows as 45,829. If a monitor does not know which kind of account it is on, every figure it reports is wrong by two orders of magnitude — and wrong in the direction that flatters.

So I built automatic detection. Currency codes, server names, symbol suffixes, and a numeric test on tick values that looked like the reliable one because it did not depend on how a broker chose to name things.

Then I measured it, on two real accounts at the same broker — one cent, one standard. Currency code: USD on both. Contract size: identical. Tick value: 1.000000 on both. Volume limits, profit currency, terminal strings: identical. Not one field the platform exposes distinguished them. Worse, the numeric test I had trusted most scored the cent account as standard.

The detection was deleted. All of it. The setting is now an explicit choice you make, because a setting that silently guesses wrong about money by a factor of a hundred is worse than a setting that asks. That was about two hundred lines of work thrown away on the evidence, and it is the single best decision in the product.

Things that were quietly broken

A monitor is judged on whether you can trust what it shows, which makes its bugs a fair thing to talk about.

The refresh countdown appeared frozen at weekends. It was updating correctly and never being repainted — on a live chart incoming price data hid it, but with the market closed nothing triggered a redraw and the timer sat there unchanged.

The panel background could vanish entirely after a recompile or a template load, leaving the text floating over bare candles.

The chart layer drew nothing at all on some brokers, because many clear the magic number on the closing side of a trade and it was looking for it there.

And the panel could show one period while the layer searched another, so a 3-Days panel full of trades sat beside an empty chart. Neither half was wrong; they were answering different questions without saying so.

What it is not

It does not trade. It places no orders, modifies no positions and touches nothing in your account. It reads history and draws a panel.

It does not evaluate your strategy or tell you whether an EA is worth running. It reports what happened. What that means is your call.

It does not detect cent accounts, and now says so plainly instead of guessing.

It will not make an unprofitable EA profitable. Nothing will.

What it will do is let you see what yours actually did — including on the morning when it is not there any more.

Get it: https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/173379