Invalid account or authorization failed in MetaTrader 5

What is causing it

The login, password or server does not match, or the account was reset by the broker.

Why this happens

Your login is three things that must all agree: the account number, the password, and the trade server that account lives on. The terminal sends all three together, and the broker's server rejects the whole attempt if any one of them is wrong. It does not tell you which one, partly for security and partly because the server that received the request has no idea about accounts held on a different server. That is why an account number and password that are both perfectly correct still return a rejection when the server is a demo server and the account is live.

The other frequent cause is the investor password. MetaTrader accounts issue two passwords: a trader password that can place orders, and an investor password that grants read-only viewing. Some brokers accept the investor password at login and then quietly put the terminal in read-only mode, and others reject it outright, so the same wrong password can produce either a failed login or a login where nothing can be traded.

The fix, step by step

1. Copy the login (account number), password and server directly from your broker welcome email.
2. Make sure you are using the trader password, not the investor (read-only) password.
3. Pick the exact server from the dropdown, not a similarly named one.
4. If you recently changed your password, log in with the new one.
5. If nothing works, reset the password in your broker client area and try again.

How to confirm it is fixed

Once logged in, check the account line at the top of the Navigator panel shows your account number and the server name you expected. Then open the Journal tab and look at the most recent entry for the session: a successful login is recorded there with the account number and server. Finally, confirm the New Order button is available rather than greyed out, which tells you that you are on the trader password and not the read-only one.

Stopping it happening again

Keep the broker welcome email, and copy the credentials from it rather than retyping them. Paste passwords into a plain text editor first if you suspect a trailing space has been copied. If you use both a demo and a live account, label the saved profiles clearly, because mixing up the two servers is by far the most common reason a correct password appears to fail.