Ghost Trades with Webhooks: Why They Happen & How to Fix Them

Ghost trades from webhooks haunt MT5 automation. You check your MT5 account in the morning. There are 3 open positions you did not place. Or worse — your strategy should have closed a trade at TP1, but the position is still running in the opposite direction. These are ghost trades, and they haunt webhook-based trading systems.

A recent Reddit thread in r/algotrading described this exact scenario: "I wake up to ghost trades — phantom orders that my strategy never signaled." The post got 200+ comments, most from traders dealing with the same problem. Here is why it happens and how to fix it.

What Are Ghost Trades?

Ghost trades are unwanted positions on your MT5 account that result from webhook automation errors. They come in three forms:

• Duplicate trades: The same signal executes twice (or more)
• Orphaned trades: A position is opened but the close signal never arrives
• Phantom orders: Orders appear with no corresponding TradingView alert

Cause 1: TradingView Webhook Retries

This is the most common cause. When TradingView sends a webhook, it expects an HTTP 200 response within a few seconds. If your server (or copier) is slow to respond — maybe it is busy executing a previous trade — TradingView assumes the delivery failed and resends the exact same webhook.

Your copier processes both requests. Two identical trades open.

The Fix: Idempotent Signal Processing

Your copier EA must deduplicate incoming signals. The approach:

1. Generate a hash of each incoming signal (action + symbol + timestamp)
2. Check if this hash was processed in the last 5–10 seconds
3. If duplicate, respond with 200 but skip execution
4. If new, execute and store the hash

TradingView Copier Pro handles this automatically with built-in deduplication. Every incoming webhook is hashed and compared against a sliding window of recent signals.

Cause 2: Race Conditions

When copying to multiple MT5 accounts, a race condition occurs when two EA instances try to process the same signal simultaneously. If the EA does not have proper concurrency handling, both instances may pass the "is this a duplicate?" check before either records it.

The Fix: Atomic Signal Locking

The EA should use a mutex or file lock to ensure only one instance processes a given signal at a time. This is particularly important on VPS setups where multiple terminals share the same data directory.

Cause 3: Failed Close Signals

Your strategy sends a close signal, but it arrives when the market is closed, the terminal is disconnected, or the symbol is different (broker suffix mismatch). The close fails silently. The position stays open. Your next entry signal fires, and now you have two positions where you should have zero.

The Fix: Close Confirmation Loop

• Verify close execution: After processing a close signal, the EA should confirm the position is actually closed
• Symbol remapping: Ensure your copier handles broker-specific symbol names. EURUSD in TradingView vs EURUSDm on your broker
• Market hours check: Queue close orders during market closure and execute when the market reopens

Cause 4: TradingView Alert Misconfiguration

Some ghost trades come from the alerts themselves:

Cause 5: Network Interruption During Execution

Your VPS loses internet for 2 seconds. During that window:

1. TradingView sends a close webhook → your server is unreachable → TradingView retries later
2. TradingView sends a new entry webhook → this one gets through
3. The close retry finally arrives → but now it closes your new position instead of the old one

The Fix: Order-Linked Close Signals

Use magic numbers or trade comments to link close signals to specific orders. When your close signal says "close the trade opened at 10:00", the EA knows exactly which position to target — not just "close all EURUSD."

Prevention Checklist