Looking at your balance is the most misleading way to evaluate your trading. An account can be in profit after three months and still hide a strategy that sooner or later empties it: a couple of lucky trades, a stop loss that was never set or a lot size that doubled after every loss.
Auditing your trading account means reading your history the way a risk manager would: not what you made, but how you made it and how much you risked to get it. In this guide we explain how to do it with your MetaTrader 4 or 5 history and which 10 metrics to check.
What a trading account audit is
An audit takes every closed trade in your account, plus deposits and withdrawals, and calculates indicators that answer three questions:
- Does the strategy have an edge? If you repeat what you do a hundred more times, do you win or lose?
- Is risk under control? How far can the account fall before it recovers?
- Does your behaviour help or hurt? Do you trade on impulse after a loss? Do you hold losers and cut winners?
The key is to measure returns excluding deposits and withdrawals. If you deposit $1,000 into a $1,000 account, the balance doubles, but your trading hasn't made anything.
How to get your MetaTrader history
You have two options:
- Export the HTML report. In MetaTrader 5, open the Toolbox (Ctrl+T), History tab, right-click → Period → All history, then Report → HTML. In MetaTrader 4, Account History tab, right-click → All history → Save as detailed report. The file contains no passwords.
- Connect the account with the investor password. It is a read-only password: it lets someone see the history and positions, but not trade or withdraw money. It has one advantage: the audit updates itself every time you trade.
With either one you can use the free AIMPATFX account audit, which calculates everything below in a few seconds.
The 10 metrics you should check
1. Profit factor
Divide what you won by what you lost. It is the fastest way to know whether your strategy has an edge.
- Below 1: the account loses money over time.
- From 1 to 1.5: profitable, but with a thin margin; a bad streak or higher commissions push it negative.
- From 1.5 to 2: solid.
- Above 2: excellent, as long as drawdown is under control and there are enough trades.
2. Expectancy per trade
What you win or lose on average per trade. If it is negative, trading more only speeds up the losses. If you measure it in R (multiples of what you risk), you can compare accounts of different sizes: an expectancy of 0.3 R means you make, on average, 30% of what you risk per trade.
3. Win rate and win/loss ratio
Win rate alone means nothing. A 40% win rate with wins three times larger than losses is very profitable; an 80% win rate with losses five times larger than wins ends badly. Always check both together.
4. Maximum drawdown
The largest fall of the account from a peak to the next trough. It measures how much pain your strategy takes. As a reference: below 10% is very controlled, 10% to 20% is acceptable for most styles and above 30% recovery becomes very hard (a 50% drop requires a 100% gain just to get back to where you started).
5. Risk per trade
How much of your balance you risk on each trade based on the distance to your stop loss. The usual professional rule is not to exceed 1% or 2%. If your audit shows trades risking 5% or more, a normal losing streak can take a third of the account.
6. Stop-loss use
The percentage of trades opened with a stop loss. Without a stop loss you cannot measure risk, and a single trade can wipe out months of work. Ideally, get close to 100%.
7. Sharpe ratio and Sortino ratio
The Sharpe ratio divides the average daily return by its volatility and annualizes it: it measures how much return you get per unit of risk. Above 1 is good and above 2 is excellent. The Sortino ratio does the same but only penalizes volatility on losing days, so it doesn't punish a strategy for having very good days.
8. Risk of ruin
The estimated probability of losing a large part of the account (for example, half) given your win rate, your win/loss ratio and your risk per trade. A profitable strategy with too large a lot size can have a high risk of ruin. It is the metric that best explains why position size matters as much as the strategy.
9. Monthly consistency
How many months end in profit and how much the result depends on a single trade. If your best trade accounts for more than 50% of total profit, the result is probably down to luck rather than a repeatable edge.
10. Behavioural mistakes
This is the difference between a spreadsheet and a real audit. The most expensive patterns are:
- Revenge trading: opening another trade minutes after a loss, with more volume.
- Hidden martingale: increasing the lot after a loss to win it back.
- Holding losers: if your losing trades last much longer than your winners, you are letting losses run and cutting profits short.
- Overtrading: days with far more trades than usual, almost always after a bad result.
Your best trading hours are also in your history
A complete audit breaks down your results by hour, session (Asia, London, New York), day of the week, symbol and trade duration. It is common to discover that a single time window or a single pair accounts for almost all the losses. Stopping trading there is the fastest and cheapest improvement there is.
How to read the result
Don't settle for a single number. A good account usually combines:
- a profit factor above 1.5,
- maximum drawdown below 20%,
- risk per trade of 1% to 2% with a stop loss on almost every trade,
- several positive months in a row,
- and no revenge or martingale patterns.
If your account fails on one of these points, that is your priority. In the AIMPATFX audit, all of this is summarized in a score from 0 to 100 broken down into profitability, risk management, consistency and discipline, and you can ask AIM for an improvement plan with the three changes that would raise your score the most.
Share your audit (and prove it's yours)
If you show results to a community, an investor or a prop firm, a screenshot proves nothing. With ownership verification you prove the account is yours and you can share it as private, link only (even password-protected) or public. See examples in the list of audited accounts.
Summary: auditing your account is the most honest way to know whether your trading works. Export your history or connect your account with the investor password, check these 10 metrics and start by fixing the one that is costing you the most. Your first audit is free.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good profit factor?
Above 1.5 is solid and above 2 is excellent, provided drawdown is under control and the sample has enough trades. Below 1, the account loses money over time.
What maximum drawdown is acceptable?
Below 10% is very controlled and 10% to 20% is acceptable for most trading styles. Above 30%, recovery becomes very hard.
Is it safe to connect my account with the investor password?
Yes. The investor password is read-only: it shows the history and positions but cannot place trades or withdraw money. Never share your master password.
