Order comments and what they give away

[Fairman]

Order comments and what they give away

Every order can carry a comment, a short text field. Expert advisors use them to tag trades with strategy names or identifiers. The field is visible to the broker and sometimes passed along in the trade record.

That has small privacy implications. A comment like "scalp_v3_breakout" tells the broker's back office what kind of strategy is running. If their risk team looks for patterns, a consistent comment makes the account easy to classify.

Magic numbers, the integer identifiers used by MetaTrader expert advisors, do something similar. They're meant for internal bookkeeping, but they remain attached to the trade.

Whether any broker acts on this information is unknowable from outside. But there's no reason to give away structure for free. Neutral or blank comments, and numbers that aren't obviously meaningful, are a minor precaution at no cost.

A more practical reason to care is conflicts. Two scripts using the same magic number on the same symbol can interfere with each other, closing each other's trades.

Keeping a simple register of identifiers avoids that kind of mess.

Any naming scheme for order comments and magic numbers that has avoided conflicts?