Trade Screenshots at Entry and Exit

Every trade's chart, saved by itself. Each time a trade opens or closes on your account, from an EA, the phone or your own hand, it saves a picture of that symbol's chart with the trade drawn on it and its details written in the corner, filed by day, with a page for each day you open in your browser. It never places, changes or closes a trade, and the pictures stay on your PC.

Why a picture. MetaTrader's History tab tells you a trade lost 40 dollars. It does not show you what the chart looked like when you went in, or where price went before it came out. A journal of pictures does, and keeping one by hand means remembering a screenshot at the worst possible moment. This takes them for you, for every trade, including the ones your EA takes at 3 in the morning while MetaTrader runs.

When it takes them

• At the open, a second or two after the fill, so a stop and a target your EA sets right after it are on the picture.
• At the close, straight away, with the line from entry to exit drawn.
• At a partial close, marked with how much of how much, such as 0.01 of 0.02.
• On a netting account, an add is a picture of its own, and a reversal is a close and an open.
• When you press Take a picture now on its card, of the chart it sits on.

What is on each picture

• The chart as you keep it: your timeframe, your template, your other indicators. It takes a picture of every chart of that symbol you have open, one per timeframe, so an M5, an H1 and an H4 chart give three views of the same moment.
• The trade drawn on it: the entry, the stop and the target, and on a close the exit and the line from entry to exit.
• A card in the corner you choose: the symbol, buy or sell, the lot size, the prices, the time, what opened or closed it (an EA, your hand, the phone, the stop loss or the take profit), the magic number and the comment. On a close, the points, the profit and swap of the volume closed, its commission and fees with its share of what was charged when it opened, and the time it was held.
• 1280 x 720 by default, or 1600 x 900 or 1920 x 1080, whatever size your chart window is.

Where they go

• Into the terminal's own folder: File, Open Data Folder, MQL5, Files, TickForgeFX Trade Screenshots, then your account number and one folder per day.
• Each day has a page, Trades.html: every trade of the day, newest first, its details and its pictures. Open it in any browser. Another page beside the day folders lists the days.
• File names start with the time and the symbol, such as 091405_EURUSD_Buy_Open_2000466557.png, so they sort in order.
• Nothing is uploaded or sent anywhere. To share a picture, send the file yourself.
• A picture is about 50 KB at the default size. Leave everything, or set a number of days to keep and older day folders are deleted. Only its own day folders are ever touched.

When there is no chart of the symbol open

An EA can trade a symbol you have no chart of, and so can the phone. Then it opens a chart of that symbol for a moment, on the timeframe you set and your default template, hands the front straight back to the chart you were on, takes the picture once the chart has loaded and closes it again. If you would rather it did not, set it to skip the picture; the day page then says no chart was open.

If MetaTrader was closed

It only sees what happens while MetaTrader runs with it attached. A trade that closed overnight at its stop, while the terminal was off, is caught up the next time it starts, up to the 50 most recent deals on the account from the last 7 days, and the picture is marked Captured late, because it shows the chart when it was taken rather than when the trade happened. The first time you attach it, it starts from that moment and shoots nothing older.

For the numbers

Pictures show you what each trade looked like. If you also want the numbers, every result split by EA with its costs, its timing and your prop firm limits, our Trading Journal for EAs and Prop Firms reads the same history and puts it on one card. This tool computes no statistics of its own: no totals, no win rate, no calendar.

What it is not

• Not a trade manager: it is an indicator, and MetaTrader lets no indicator open, change or close a trade.
• Not a sender: no Telegram, no e-mail, no web. The pictures stay where it saves them.
• Not for the Strategy Tester: MetaTrader saves no chart pictures there, so in a test the card says so and nothing is written. Use it on your live or demo account.

Good to know

• One copy covers the whole account: put it on any chart, beside your EA if you like. A second copy on another chart waits, and takes over if the first is removed. The copy at work decides what is captured, so set the filters on that one.
• Filters: all symbols or only the chart's own, every trade or one magic number (0 is your manual trades), and opens and closes each on or off, with partial closes on or off within closes.
• A chart scrolled back into the past is skipped, because its picture would not show the trade.
• Its own card is never in its pictures.
• Hedging and netting accounts, both. Times are the broker's server time, as in the History tab.

If you need me, I answer

Ask in the comments or by MQL5 message and you get a reply from me. If something is broken I want to know about it, and a bug report gets a fix rather than a workaround.

The trades you remember are the ones that went well. This keeps the rest.