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Why does MT5 show EA trades as "Manually" in the account history?

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Hello everyone,

I am monitoring an MT5 account in read-only mode. The account owner says they are using an EA to trade, and the account makes more than 1,000 trades per day.

However, when I check the History/Deals, the trades are shown as "Manually" instead of "Expert".

So my questions are:

  • If the trades are actually opened/closed by an EA, why does MT5 show them as "Manually"?

  • Is it possible for an EA to generate trades that are recorded as "Manually"?

  • Is there any way to determine from the trading history whether a trade was actually generated by an EA or placed manually?

I would appreciate any explanation from experienced MT5/MQL5 users.

Thank you!


Luu Tuan Trung: Is it possible for an EA to generate trades that are recorded as "Manually"?
The EA is using magic number zero.
William Roeder #:
The EA is using magic number zero.

Magic = 0 from a Script/EA gives this :


William Roeder #:
The EA is using magic number zero.

nope

magic 0

William Roeder #:
The EA is using magic number zero.

Please help clarify this issue for me. I suspect that this account may be a scam created by the broker itself. I feel that the trades are being opened only after the price has already moved

On your third question, telling it from the history alone.

Read the timestamps rather than the labels. I once went through 801 live deals on one account, line by line, for a report, and the gaps between consecutive deals were what settled it. A person does not place trades one second apart, hour after hour, through the night. Count the gaps, see what share of them are under two seconds, and check whether the same pattern continues at three in the morning on the server clock. With a thousand trades a day you will know inside a few minutes.

Position size is the second check. A person's sizing wanders. A program's does not.
Luu Tuan Trung #:
I suspect that this account may be a scam created by the broker itself.

The fact that you're unable to positively identify the signal provider is huge red flag, in and of itself.

Luu Tuan Trung #:

Please help clarify this issue for me. I suspect that this account may be a scam created by the broker itself. I feel that the trades are being opened only after the price has already moved

The issue is already clear.
Alain Verleyen #:
The issue is already clear.
If I post the investor password (read-only password) of a real trading account on the forum, would that violate the forum rules?

The reason label is set by the server based on how the order arrived, not by the magic number. Order sent from a terminal by an EA gets marked expert, one you click yourself gets client, from the phone app it's mobile, and so on. Magic is just a separate field the EA stamps on its own orders. So magic 0 on its own doesn't turn an EA trade into a manual one.


Which is why your case is worth a closer look. A thousand trades a day all showing as manual usually means they aren't coming from an EA sitting on a terminal at all. Orders pushed in through a bridge, an external API, or from the manager side land as client. Copy trading from another account can do the same depending on how the copier sends them.


Adding to Ayaz's point about timestamps, there's one more thing you can read straight off the history. With that many trades you'd expect a fair number of positions closed by SL or TP. If everything closes as a plain deal and nothing ever hits a stop, that tells you something on its own.


On your last question, I wouldn't post the investor password here. Read only or not it's still a credential on a live account, and once it's on a public forum you can't pull it back. If you want people to check the numbers, export the statement to HTML and blank the account number. That gives anyone here everything they need to judge it.

The "Manually" label in the History tab isn't about the magic number at all, it comes from the deal's DEAL_REASON, which the trade server sets based on how the order that produced it was actually submitted. You can check this precisely instead of guessing from timestamps: log in with the read-only investor password, run a small script that loops HistorySelect() plus HistoryDealGetInteger(ticket, DEAL_REASON) over the account's deal history, and print DEAL_REASON_CLIENT/DEAL_ REASON_MOBILE/DEAL_REASON_WEB against DEAL_REASON_EXPERT for each one. If most or all deals come back as CLIENT/MOBILE/WEB rather than EXPERT, those trades were placed by a person clicking in a terminal, not by an Expert Advisor, whatever the magic number says. It's a read-only diagnostic that doesn't touch trading, and it settles the "EA or manual" question with data straight from the server instead of inference from timing patterns.
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