Who else is trading on your MT5 account? A practical checklist
Trading Systems

Who else is trading on your MT5 account? A practical checklist

29 October 2026, 15:12
Manit Chin
Manit Chin
0
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You open MetaTrader 5 and see a position you did not open. Or one of your positions is gone, and your EA did not close it. Most of the time the reason is harmless. Sometimes it is not. Here are the five most common causes, how to check each one yourself, and what to do about it.

1. An EA you forgot about

A test EA on another chart, a second terminal on the same account, an old EA you migrated to a VPS months ago. Each one trades with its own magic number.

Check: open every terminal and every chart that is logged in to this account and look at which EAs are attached. Do not forget the MQL5 VPS: whatever was migrated last is still running there.

2. Two copies of the same EA

The classic case: you migrate an EA to the MQL5 VPS and leave it running on your PC too. Both copies trade the same magic number, so it looks like one EA opening double positions.

Check: if positions come in pairs a few seconds apart, this is the first thing to look at. Remove the EA from the PC chart after migrating, or use an EA that knows where it is allowed to run.

3. A Signal or a trade copier

Copied trades use their own magic numbers. If you subscribed to a Signal or run a copier, its trades will look like "unknown" trades.

Check: compare the time of the unknown trade with the trades of the Signal or the source account.

4. Someone who has your password

A manual trade opened from the phone app or the web terminal, at a time when you were not trading.

Check: if you never trade by hand from the phone or the web, any manual trade from there is a warning sign. Change your trading password at your broker. Give the investor (read-only) password to anyone who only needs to watch.

5. The broker

Balance corrections, positions closed and reopened at rollover, a stop out, changed swaps or leverage. These are not trades by a person, but they change your account.

Check: the account history shows balance operations and deals with their time. Compare them with the broker's notices.

Let a tool watch for you

Checking all of this by hand every day is tiring, and the worst cases happen at night.

  • Order Watchdog (free, full source in CodeBase) alerts you about unknown magic numbers, duplicate positions, positions without a stop loss and stop outs. It never sends a trade request.
  • Order Watchdog Pro (Market) also closes trades that are not yours in Act mode: unknown magic numbers and manual trades from places you do not use. Positions with your own magic numbers are never touched. It also watches the broker side (balance changes, rollover closes, leverage and swap changes) and can send alerts to Telegram. It starts in Dry run, so you can see what it would do before it does anything.

Neither tool makes your trading more profitable. They make sure that what happens on your account is what you meant to happen.

Free Order Watchdog: https://www.mql5.com/en/code/78748
Order Watchdog Pro: https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/204234

#expert advisor, MT5, vps, Magic number, account security