Integration guide
MetaTrader 5
Export a trade history report from your terminal and drop it into Candela. Five steps, about two minutes, and no broker connection.
Exporting the report
Open MetaTrader 5 on desktop.
Candela reads the desktop terminal's own report. The mobile and web versions don't offer the export, so you'll need MetaTrader on a Mac or PC — signed in to the account you want to journal.
Go to the History tab.
It's along the bottom of the terminal, beside Trade and Exposure, and is called Account History in some builds. If you can't see it, turn the panel on with View → Toolbox.
Right-click, choose Orders, then pick your date range.
Right-click anywhere in the history, choose Orders, then set the period — Custom Period lets you pick exact dates. Whole months import cleanly. If you trade in size, split a long history into a few ranges rather than exporting years at once.
Right-click again, choose Report, then XLSX or HTML.
Right-click again and choose Report. XLSX and HTML both work. Keep the terminal in English: a report exported in another language has translated column headers, and the headers are what Candela matches on.
Save it, then drop the file into the uploader.
Nothing saves when you drop it. Candela reads the file, shows every trade it found alongside the statement's own total to check against, and waits for you to confirm.
Set the server timezone before you drop the file
MT5 stamps every trade in your broker's server time, not yours, and the report never says which that is. Most MT5 brokers run UTC+3. Get it wrong and every trade lands hours out — your P&L still looks perfectly correct while your session breakdown and best-hours analysis quietly stop meaning anything. The offset is in your broker's account details, or their support will tell you.
When a report won't read
- Candela says it can't read the statement
- Almost always a modified file. Opening the report in Excel and saving it again rewrites the structure the parser depends on — re-export from MT5 and drop the original without opening it. A report exported in a language other than English fails for the same reason: the column headers no longer match.
- The trade count is lower than I expected
- Candela journals positions, not individual fills. MT5 splits one position into separate deals when it is opened or closed in parts, so a statement showing 143 deals can be 49 positions. One decision you made is one trade in your journal — nothing is lost, the fills are just grouped back together.
- My deposits are missing
- They shouldn't be. Candela reads the balance rows out of the Deals section and adds them to your account ledger automatically, so your percentages measure against the capital that was really there at the time. If a deposit is missing, the report was likely exported without that section — export the full report rather than positions only.
- An open position isn't showing
- By design. A journal records what happened, and a position still running hasn't happened yet — neither its final P&L nor the commission attached to it is settled. Close it, re-import, and it arrives with exact figures.