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What the platform's Journal tab tells you after a bad fill

When a fill comes back worse than expected, most people look at the chart and get annoyed. The more useful place to look is the Journal tab in MT4 or MT5, plus the Experts tab if an EA was involved. It logs each order request, the time it was sent, the reply from the server and the final price.

From those lines you can work out a few things. The gap between the request time and the fill time tells you how long the order sat before it was executed. A few milliseconds is normal. Several hundred milliseconds or more during a quiet market points to something on the connection or the broker side. The requested price against the filled price shows the actual slippage. And any requote or off quotes messages show up there too, which is useful because they don't always appear in the trade history.

I copy the relevant lines into my notes whenever a fill looks off, with the time and the pair. After a few weeks, you have a record that shows whether bad fills cluster at certain times, on certain pairs or after certain kinds of moves.

If you ever need to raise a complaint with a broker, this is also the evidence they will want. Saying the fill was bad gets nowhere. Sending the log lines with timestamps gets a proper answer.

The Journal tab is badly underused. One thing worth knowing is that MT5 writes those logs to text files in the terminal data folder, under logs, one file per day. If a fill dispute comes up a week later, the tab may no longer show the lines, but the file is still there. Sending the exact lines to support, with the order ticket and the millisecond timestamps, gets a much better answer than a screenshot of the chart. I also check the Experts tab for any retry the EA made, since a second request at a worse price can look like slippage on the statement.

The times in the Journal tab are your local computer time, while the trade history shows server time. That catches people out when they try to match the log with the broker's records. Write down your offset from server time somewhere visible. When you send log lines to support, convert them first or mention the offset clearly, otherwise they'll look at the wrong minute and tell you nothing unusual happened. Daylight saving makes it worse, because the offset between your computer and the server can change on different dates in spring and autumn. A note with both dates and both offsets saves a lot of confusion.

MT5 is more detailed than MT4 here. It shows the order, the deal and the position as separate events, which lets you see partial fills and how a single order was split. If you trade larger sizes on MT5 and see one order turn into several deals at different prices, the Journal and the History tab together show exactly what happened. On MT4 that detail is mostly hidden. For anyone moving from MT4, it's one of the main reasons to switch if you trade size, since the extra detail removes a lot of guesswork about what the broker actually did with each order.

The log files are also saved to disk in the terminal's data folder, one file per day. The tab only shows the current session, but the files keep the history. If you only notice a bad fill later, you can still dig up the lines from the file for that date. I'd suggest backing up that folder every so often, because some setups clear old logs automatically after a while. The files are plain text, so they're easy to search with any editor. Searching for the ticket number pulls out every line related to that order, from request to final fill, in a few seconds.

Ping also shows up in the connection status at the bottom of the terminal, but that number is a snapshot. The Journal lines give you the real delay on each order. If the ping looks fine and the execution times are still slow, the delay is on the broker's side or in their bridge to the liquidity providers. That's a different conversation with support than a slow internet connection would be. Write down both numbers when it happens. A log showing a fast ping alongside slow execution on the same orders is the clearest evidence you can give a broker that the problem sits on their side.