Modifying and Closing Trades in MT4 and MT5

Most trade modifications lose money. The platform makes them easy — drag a line, click a button — and that ease is the problem, because the modifications that feel most urgent are the ones a journal will later show were costly. This lesson covers how to do each one and, more usefully, when not to.

Modifying stop and target

Dragging is faster and easier to do accidentally. Verify the Trade tab afterwards — a stop dragged a few pips by mistake is not always obvious.

The modification never to make

Moving a stop further from entry.

Covered in the Risk Management section and repeated here because the platform makes it trivially easy at precisely the moment you should not.

The position was sized for the original stop. Widening it converts a planned 1% loss into 2% or more, decided while the trade is losing and judgement is compromised.

Break-even stops

Moving the stop to the entry price once a trade is in profit.

Legitimate, and worth understanding what it costs.

The benefit: the trade can no longer lose money.

The cost: ordinary retracement now closes the position at zero. Many trades retrace to near entry before continuing to target, and a break-even stop converts those into scratches.

Whether it improves expectancy depends entirely on your data. Some approaches benefit; many do not.

The honest way to decide: journal fifty trades with a break-even rule and fifty without, then compare. Anything else is preference dressed as method.

Trailing stops

MetaTrader has a built-in trailing stop: right-click the position → Trailing Stop → choose a pip distance.

Two limitations worth knowing.

It only runs while the platform is open. The trailing is done by your terminal, not by the broker’s server. Close the platform and the trailing stops — the last placed stop level remains, but it no longer follows.

It trails by a fixed pip distance, which ignores volatility and structure. A distance appropriate in quiet conditions is too tight in volatile ones.

Manual trailing behind swing points, adjusted as structure develops, is generally better where the approach calls for trailing at all.

Worth noting that trailing makes expectancy harder to measure, as the R-multiples lesson discusses. Our own signals use a fixed target with a full close for that reason — a variable exit produces results that are difficult to evaluate honestly across a sample.

Closing a position

The close button shows the current closing price. On market execution accounts the fill may differ slightly.

Partial closes

In the close dialog, reduce the volume before confirming. Closing 0.05 of a 0.10 lot position leaves 0.05 open.

On MT4 and MT5 hedging accounts this creates a remaining position with its own ticket. On MT5 netting accounts the position volume simply reduces.

The practical caution is the measurement problem: a partially closed trade does not resolve to a single R figure, which makes journal analysis harder. Not a reason to avoid partials, but a reason to know you are making evaluation more difficult in exchange for whatever flexibility you gain.

Closing multiple positions

MT4: select several rows with Ctrl or Shift, right-click → Close.

MT5 offers “Close All” options in the Trade tab context menu, including closing only profitable or only losing positions.

Useful before a major news release when you want to be flat quickly.

Closing by opposite position

An MT4 feature that occasionally confuses people.

If you hold a buy and a sell on the same instrument, right-click → Close By lets you close them against each other.

Rarely useful for most traders. It exists because MT4’s hedging model permits holding both simultaneously, which is a situation worth avoiding rather than managing — two opposing positions on the same instrument are a flat position paying two spreads.

Modifications and the journal

A practical suggestion that turns this lesson into data.

Record every modification in your journal: what you changed, when, and why.

Most traders who do this discover that modified trades underperform substantially. That finding is more persuasive than any advice, because it is their own data.

It also identifies which modification specifically is the problem, which makes the fix precise rather than general.

Closing pending orders

Different mechanic from closing positions.

Right-click the pending order → Modify or Delete Order → Delete. Or drag the order line off the chart in MT5.

Deleting a pending order has no cost — it never filled, so there is no spread paid and no position to close.

What happens when a stop or target is hit

The position closes automatically at the broker’s server, not your terminal — which means it works whether or not your platform is open.

This is worth knowing: stops and targets placed with the order are server-side and remain active if your computer loses connection. Trailing stops are not, as noted above.

The closed trade moves to the History tab with the exit price and result.

During fast conditions the fill may differ from the stop level — slippage, covered in the Risk Management section. The History tab shows what you actually got rather than what you asked for, and comparing those over time reveals how much slippage your broker’s execution produces.

A simple modification policy

Written down, this removes the live judgement — which is the point of every structural measure in this Academy.

What to do next

The next lesson covers reading lot size, margin and account figures in the platform, and how to verify your position sizing before every trade.

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Frequently asked questions