One account is a chart and a mouse. Three accounts is the same trade entered three times, at three prices, with one of them forgotten. It does not scale, and the failure is never dramatic — it is a missed leg nobody notices until the statement.
Why manual multi-account does not work
Everyone discovers the same four problems in the same order:
- Different fills. Three manual entries are three different prices, seconds apart. Your accounts diverge from day one and never reconverge.
- The forgotten leg. You close two and miss the third. This is the expensive one, and it happens on exactly the day you are busy.
- Sizing drift. Accounts with different balances need different lot sizes. Doing that arithmetic under pressure is how a 0.1 becomes a 1.0.
- Terminal babysitting. Every additional account is another terminal to keep logged in, another thing to restart when the broker drops it.
First: stop running the terminals yourself
The usual answer is a VPS with several terminals on it, and it works right up until it does not — an update reboots the box, one terminal is logged out, another has a modal dialog waiting for a click, and the one rule you cared about did not run on the one account that mattered.
chartTrigger provisions a MetaTrader 5 terminal per account on its own infrastructure, signs it in, and supervises the process — restarting it if it stops and reconnecting it if the broker drops. Each account runs as an isolated terminal instance, so one broker's problems stay with that broker. You do not rent a server, install anything, or remote in.
Arming one rule across every account
The point of the model: a rule is defined once, on a chart, and armed against the accounts you choose. One level, one set of conditions, one arming action — every selected account acts on the same evaluation at the same moment, rather than on three separate human decisions.
That is also what makes the ordinary safeguards work at the portfolio level rather than per account:
- A cooldown applies to the rule, so one messy session cannot produce a cascade everywhere at once.
- A maximum fire count per arming caps total exposure to a rule misbehaving.
- Fire state survives restarts, so a redeploy does not re-enter across every account simultaneously — the single worst version of that bug.
Where the accounts actually run
Accounts are placed on a node — a machine with capacity. If there is no room, an account sits pending and starts nothing rather than being crammed onto a saturated box, because a terminal competing for CPU is a terminal with unpredictable latency. A node takes no accounts at all until its agent has checked in, so work is never assigned to a machine that has not confirmed it is alive.
Where copying is involved, a destination is placed on the same node as its source. That is deliberate: copying across machines would put a network hop inside the one path where latency actually matters.
Seeing what happened, per account
With one account you remember. With six you need a record. Every attempt is on the record, including failures and the broker's return codes, and failed orders are retried with duplicate protection so a retry cannot open the same position twice — the specific failure mode that turns a network blip into an unintended double position.
Your own view shows your terminals' status and heartbeats. Host-level machine statistics are deliberately not shown to customers: several tenants can share hardware, so CPU and memory of the underlying machine are the operator's business, not a window into other people's activity.
A note on prop firms and account rules
Many people running several accounts are running evaluation accounts with rules attached — maximum daily loss, consistency requirements, restrictions on copying between accounts. Those are between you and that firm. Automation software does not know your firm's terms and cannot enforce them. Read them before you arm the same rule across several accounts, particularly where identical entries across accounts are treated as copy trading.
The sequence worth following
- Build the rule once and test it in the Proving Ground.
- Run it in Ghost Mode on one account for a fortnight.
- Arm it live on one account, at minimum size.
- Only then extend it to the rest — and keep the cooldown and fire cap in place.
Common questions
Do I need a VPS for several MT5 accounts?
Not with chartTrigger — terminals are provisioned and supervised on its infrastructure, one isolated instance per account.
Can accounts be at different brokers?
Yes. Any broker offering a retail MetaTrader 5 account, and each runs as its own terminal.
Will a restart re-enter positions everywhere?
No. Fires recorded since a rule was armed are replayed after a restart, so cooldowns and fire caps hold.
One rule, every account
Define the level once and arm it across the accounts you choose — with hosted terminals, a shared cooldown, and every attempt on the record.
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Risk note. This article is educational material about how chartTrigger works. It is not investment advice, not a recommendation to trade any instrument, and nothing here forecasts results. Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of loss. Any historical simulation referred to is exactly that — a run over past bars under stated spread and slippage assumptions, not an indication of future performance.