External / manual trades from MT5

Trades you open directly in MT5, rather than through the dashboard, are left alone by the EA's management logic but still show up in your history. This page covers exactly where that line falls, because it is not in the same place for every action.

How the EA tells them apart

Every position the EA opens carries its magic number, an identifier MT5 attaches to orders so a program can recognise its own work. A position you open by hand has a different magic number, or none at all.

That single comparison is the whole mechanism. The EA does not inspect the comment, the symbol, or the volume to decide whether a position is yours or its own.

What the EA will not do to them

• No trailing stops. Positions that are not the EA's own are skipped by the trailing loop, even if a trailing stop is active on other trades.
• No stop or target changes. A modify signal only touches positions with the EA's magic number.
• No targeted closes. close, closebuy and closesell are filtered by both magic number and symbol.

Drawdown protection never touches open positions at all, external or not. It blocks new signals and leaves everything already open to run.

The exception: closeall closes everything

closeall is deliberately unfiltered. It ignores both the magic number and the symbol, which means it closes every open position on that account, including trades you opened by hand in MT5.

This is the one action that reaches outside the EA's own trades. If you keep discretionary positions on the same account as automated ones, closeall will close those too. Use close with a symbol when you mean "flatten the strategy", and reserve closeall for when you genuinely mean "flatten the account".

They still count against your position limit

The Max simultaneous input counts every open position on the account, not just the ones the EA opened. Three manual positions on an account with a limit of five leaves room for two automated trades.

If signals are being refused for hitting the limit and the dashboard shows fewer trades than expected, count the positions in your terminal rather than the entries in the trade queue.

They still appear in your history

The EA reports completed deals to the dashboard without filtering by magic number, and it backfills history when it starts. Trades you placed by hand therefore appear in your dashboard analytics alongside routed ones.

That is usually what you want, since account-level performance should reflect everything that touched the balance. It does mean analytics for an account you also trade manually are not a clean read of the strategy's own performance.

In short