You withdrew money from your MetaTrader account and your tool says you lost 45%. That is not true.
It can happen in MT4 and in MT5. Some tools calculate drawdown, the fall from the last peak, on the account balance, and the balance drops just the same whether you lose money trading or take it out to pay for a home repair. To the account it is the same thing. To you, trying to understand how you trade, it is not.
One thing before we go on: I developed Trading Account Analytics and I sell it on the MQL5 Market, so read this knowing that.
Why a withdrawal inflates your drawdown
Say you deposit 10,000 euros and make 1,000, so you have 11,000. Then you withdraw 5,000 and 6,000 is left. If drawdown is measured on the balance, the peak was 11,000 and now there is 6,000: a fall of 5,000, or 45.45%. But you have not lost anything trading. On the contrary, you are 1,000 up. The market did not cause that fall. You did, by taking the money out.
Deposits work the other way round. A top-up can cover a real loss and make the drawdown look smaller than it was.
How to calculate the real drawdown without deposits or withdrawals
The idea is to measure only what your trading did. You split the history into periods, cutting at every deposit or withdrawal, work out the return of each period and chain them together. That chained series is a return index that does not move when money comes in or goes out, and the percentage drawdown is measured on it. For the drawdown in money, the cumulative profit is enough: it starts at zero and ignores capital movements too.
You can do it by hand, exporting the history to a spreadsheet and subtracting every movement, but once there are several in the same month it is slow and easy to get wrong.
A tool for MT4 and MT5 that does it for you
Trading Account Analytics is a utility for MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 that runs this calculation inside your terminal, from your account history. The main curve and the drawdown come out without deposits, withdrawals or credit: the percentage is measured on a return index that is cut at every capital movement, and the drawdown in money on the cumulative profit curve. In the example above you get 0%, which is what an account that has only made money should show.
Nothing disappears: the real balance and equity are still in the curve dropdown, with a note that they include deposits and withdrawals. You can see the drawdown on the Overview and Risk & Drawdown screens. Everything is calculated inside your terminal, and the program is read-only: it never opens, modifies or closes trades.
What is worth knowing
If you deposit or withdraw while a position is open, the terminal does not keep intraday prices, so it cannot know the exact value at that moment. The least penalising assumption is used, one that never inflates the drawdown, but it is still an estimate and may understate it. To sharpen it, leave the panel running on a chart: it records equity every 5 minutes by default, as long as the terminal is open.
And the usual caveat: this is an analysis of what has already happened in your account, not a forecast. A small drawdown yesterday says nothing about tomorrow.
Trading Account Analytics is available for MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 on the MQL5 Market, and you can see it working in the video on its product page.
For educational and informational purposes only, published on 11 November 2026. This is not financial, tax or legal advice, a personal investment recommendation, or an offer or solicitation to buy any product. The numerical example is fictitious. Risk warning: leveraged products such as CFDs are complex, can lose money rapidly, even more than the capital deposited, and are not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Figures and features may have changed since publication. Consult an authorised professional before making decisions. EFPA EFA certificate no. 35.181: the certificate shows training, it is not an authorisation to advise.