MetaTrader 5: Unloved Child of MetaQuotes

One of the Barney Stinson’s (character from “How I met your mother”) rules says “new is always better!” That is quite true, just look at yourself. I bet you don’t read this text from the computer that takes two stores and could warm up an entire city in Alaska after 15 minutes of working. Your phone weights less than your wallet but you can shoot an HD video with it. I’m ready to bet that your car has more than 2 horse powers.But let’s look at the Forex trading market.

MetaTrader 5: the Unloved Child of MetaQuotes

Like brothers

In June, 2010 MetaQuotes Software officially released MetaTrader 5 (MT5), but though it was 5 years younger than MT4 for some reasons today you can hardly find 25 brokers who offer you the ability to trade with MT5 live against almost 500 companies remaining on MT4. What are the reasons of that strange situation? I decided to figure them out. To be completely true, I’ve been using MT4 myself, so to tell about MT5 I’ve open the demo account with one of the brokers that offer me such possibility.

First I thought that there might be some considerable interface changes that scare both: traders and brokers from using MT5. However I could hardly find the difference: same charts, same operation buttons, just a bit bigger, everything is on its usual places.

Than I thought about usability of a new platform, I started to check all the menus searching for the differences. I found a couple, and guess what, I liked them. First difference is that the one click trading module is built in from the very beginning, which makes life easier for the short time traders. Another feature of MT5 is a built-in market depth indicator. In theory it is very useful tool, but in practice you have to figure out the correct way of using it, otherwise you could be tricking yourself.

What I found the most convenient change is that indicators now are divided to the categories such as: trend, oscillators, volumes, Bill Williams, etc.

In the toolbox beneath the chart a couple of new tabs appeared. The one that looks interesting to me is “Market”. There you can see different custom indicators and EA available for download. It is very easy to use: pick one, double click on it, read the description and reviews and then press download (up in the right corner). New tools will be automatically placed in the respective spot of your navigator. Other tabs just provide you with the additional information about you r account. Everything else looks for me the same.

What scaring people out of the MT5

First thing that you have to know is that MT5 has been written in the new programming language called MQL5 comparing to C that was commonly used for MT4. For the regular users it means that all your custom indicators and EA that was created for MT4 are not working anymore. How pity is that? So the first reason why the MT5 is an unloved child is the fact that users are very much involved in MT4 trading.

On the other side we have brokers who already invest lots of money in MT4, developed the supportive materials, bridges, and executives and they don’t feel like going through that again. Thereby MT5 platform is not offered frequently for the users’ choice. So the second reason why the MT5 is an unloved child is the adaptation difficulties.

Talking about the reasons why people don’t like to use MT5, we cannot pass by the fact that in the beginning this platform was very unstable. Traders who decided to try prentice hand on MT5 reported that it often failed throwing the BSOD right in your face, like a clown did with cake. You might think it’s funny but imagine yourself about to place 2.0 lot order of your life and next moment all you can see is BSOD killing your dream. Anyways, I have to say, that the bug is already fixed and MT5 stays as a Great Wall without any breakoffs.

That was my vision of why the MT5 is so unpopular comparing to its older brother. Now it would be very interesting for me to know your opinion. Did you have any experience with MT5, and what was that experience? If there are some reasons for MT5 to be so much unloved that I’m missing in my article?

Continue reading here: Top 4 questions about Forex trading answered

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