Execution data for MetaTrader 5
Stop-loss hunting: what your own execution data actually shows
The stop came out to the pip, price turned around, and the trade would have worked. It is one of the oldest arguments in retail trading and it never gets settled, because almost nobody brings measurements to it. Your own account produces measurements. This page is about what they can establish, and - just as important - what they cannot.
Two questions that keep getting mixed up
"Did someone go after my stop?" and "does this happen on my account more than I should expect?" look like the same question. They are not, and only the second one is answerable from your terminal.
The first asks about intent and about what happened inside systems you cannot see. Nothing in your trade history speaks to it. The second asks about the distribution of your own fills, spreads and timings around your own stop levels, compared against your own history. That is a measurement problem, and it has a real answer - occasionally a surprising one.
Being precise about which question you are asking is the whole difference between an argument and a finding.
Why a stop being hit is not evidence on its own
Before measuring anything, the base rate has to be on the table, because it disqualifies most of what gets posted as proof.
Stops cluster. Traders place them in the same small set of places: just beyond the prior swing high or low, on round numbers, a fixed number of pips from entry, one ATR out. Those levels are visible on every chart, which means a large number of resting orders sit within a few pips of each other. Price moving into a zone where orders are concentrated, triggering them, and then continuing or reversing is ordinary market behaviour. It happens to levels nobody is watching, in instruments nobody is trading against you, and in markets with no broker in the middle at all.
There is a second, quieter problem: you remember the stop-outs that reversed. The ones where price blew straight through and kept going do not feel like anything, so they are not in your mental sample. Any impression formed from memory is drawn from a biased subset by construction. Your trade record is the first correction available, before any deeper analysis - it contains the trades you forgot.
So the honest starting position is: your stop being taken out before a favourable move is the expected outcome of placing a stop at a visible level in a volatile market. On its own it supports no conclusion whatsoever. Measurement is how you get past "on its own" - and measurement means a comparison group, not a screenshot.
What your own execution data can establish
Everything below is an observation about your account. Each is recorded per trade, each can be compared against your own history, and none requires knowing anything about anyone's intentions.
The distribution of your fills around your stop levels
Requested versus filled price on every stop-out, as a distribution rather than an average. You can see whether your stop exits fill worse than your other exits on the same symbol, and by how much, in points and in account currency.
Whether adverse excursion clusters near your stops
How far past your stop price the market actually went before turning. If overshoot is consistently small - price reaches your level, barely exceeds it, and reverses - that is a shape, and shapes are checkable against a control.
Whether spread widening coincides with your stop-outs
The spread at the moment the stop triggered, against your own median for that symbol at that hour. A stop reached by a widening spread rather than by the market trading through it is a different event, and the two are distinguishable in the record.
Whether it concentrates in time
Stop-outs grouped by hour, session, day of week, and proximity to scheduled news or rollover. Concentration in a specific window is one of the few patterns strong enough to survive a small sample, and it is directly actionable.
Whether anything changed
The same strategy, the same symbol, this quarter against last - or the same strategy running on two accounts side by side. A change in your own conditions over time is the strongest comparison available to a retail trader, because you supply the control yourself.
Whether requotes cluster around the trigger
Return codes on orders sent near your stop level - requotes, off quotes, rejections - and how your EA responded to each. This is recorded, timestamped, and frequently the part of the sequence traders never look at.
What your own execution data cannot establish
This list is not a disclaimer. It is the part that makes the list above worth anything, and it is the part missing from nearly every page written on this topic.
Intent
No sequence of fills reveals why anything happened. Data can show that an outcome occurred and how often. It cannot show that it was aimed at you, and no honest reading of it will.
What happened internally
How an order was routed, whether it was internalised or passed on, how a price was constructed, what any system did on receipt - none of it is visible from a terminal. Your record ends at the boundary of your own account.
Order flow you cannot see
Where other traders' stops sat, how large they were, what the wider book looked like. Retail forex has no consolidated tape, so claims about aggregate positioning are inference, not observation.
That your pattern is not just volatility
The important one. A run of stop-outs followed by reversals is exactly what normal volatility plus a visible stop produces. Distinguishing a real pattern from that requires a control group and enough trades - and most samples that feel convincing have neither.
A test you can actually run
The point of this procedure is the control. Without one, "price came back to my stop" is a description of a stop, not a finding.
- Define the population. Every trade that exited at your stop, over a period long enough to contain a real number of them. Not the memorable ones - all of them.
- Measure the overshoot. For each, how far beyond your stop price the market went before reversing, and how long it stayed there. Keep the distribution.
- Build the control. Measure the same overshoot at comparable levels where you had no position - the same round numbers and swing points in periods you were flat. If price behaves the same way at levels you were not trading, the behaviour is not about you.
- Compare fills against your own exits. Requested versus filled at stop-outs, against your take-profit and manual exits on the same symbol and session. A difference here is specific and quantifiable.
- Compare spread against your own median. Spread at the trigger versus your 30-day median for that symbol and hour, so the benchmark is your account rather than a general claim about what spreads should be.
- Segment by time. By hour, session and proximity to news. Concentration is informative; an even spread across the clock is informative too.
- State your sample size and stop there. Write down how many stop-outs the conclusion rests on. If it is twenty, say so, and treat the result as a reason to keep recording rather than an answer.
How to read what comes back
| What the data shows | What it supports | What it does not support |
|---|---|---|
| Overshoot at your stops matches overshoot at levels you did not trade | Normal behaviour at clustered levels. Your stop placement is the variable. | Anything about your account being treated differently. |
| Stop-out fills are consistently worse than your other exits on the same symbol | A measurable difference in fill quality at stop exits, worth quantifying and tracking. | A cause. Order type, liquidity at that moment and volatility all produce this. |
| Spread at your stop triggers is far above your own median for that hour | Spread conditions at your stop-outs differ from your baseline - a specific, reportable observation. | That the widening was directed at your position. |
| Stop-outs concentrate in one hour or around one recurring event | A timing pattern you can act on immediately by changing when you hold risk. | An explanation of why that window behaves that way. |
| Conditions at your stops changed between two comparable periods | A change in your account's recorded conditions, with dates attached. | The reason for the change, which sits outside your data. |
What to do with a result
Notice that every row above leads somewhere useful without needing the intent question answered. That is the practical argument for measuring rather than arguing.
If overshoot at your stops matches the control, the finding is about your stop placement, and it is fixable: further from the obvious level, based on structure or volatility rather than a round number or a fixed pip count. If fills or spread at stop-outs differ from your own baseline, you have a specific, dated, quantified observation about your account - and you can compare a second account on the same strategy, which is the cleanest test available to a retail trader. If it concentrates in a window, stop holding risk through that window.
And if you take the record to your broker, take it as what it is: a record of the conditions on your account over a stated period, with the method and the sample size written down. What execution data can and cannot show about your broker covers that conversation in more detail. A factual record invites a factual answer. An accusation built on a small sample invites nothing.
Questions traders ask
Is stop-loss hunting real?
Two things are true at once, which is why the argument never ends. Price does gravitate toward zones where orders are concentrated - that is a documented market dynamic, not a controversial one, and it needs no one to be acting against you. Whether any specific party deliberately targeted your individual stop is a separate question, and it is not one your terminal can answer. Anyone telling you it definitely did or definitely did not happen on your account is going beyond what the available data supports.
Can execution data prove that a broker hunted my stops?
No. Execution data records what happened on your account: the price you requested, the price you got, the spread at that moment, the timing, the return codes. It cannot establish intent and it cannot show what happened inside systems you have no visibility into. What it can do is replace an impression with a measurement, and tell you whether there is anything to look into at all.
Can my broker see where my stop is?
A stop attached to a position in MT5 is held by the trade server - that is how the order type works, and it is documented platform behaviour. It is a fact about where the order is stored, and it is not a statement about what anyone does with it. If you would rather your stop not rest on the server, managing the exit from your own terminal or EA is a real alternative with real trade-offs: it only protects you while you are connected.
How many stop-outs before a pattern means anything?
More than most people have when they conclude. There is no universal number, because it depends on how large the effect is relative to the natural variation in your results. The practical test is the control in step 3: if your stop-out distribution and your control distribution overlap heavily, you do not yet have a difference, no matter how many individual charts look damning.
Related pages
Waitlist
The measurements above, recorded automatically
ExecGuard records per-trade execution data on MT5 accounts - requested versus filled price, spread at entry and exit, send-to-fill time, return codes, commission and fees - and summarises it at the account level so a question like this one can be answered with your own history instead of a screenshot. The tracking EA will be published in full, so you can inspect exactly what is recorded and how each metric is derived.
It is not open to everyone yet. The waitlist is a waitlist: we are trying to learn what traders actually want to settle before building more of it. If you join, the useful thing you can tell us is what you saw and what you have already ruled out.