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MT4

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Brokers offering MetaTrader 4 — still the most widely supported retail trading platform, two decades after release.

Brokers supporting MT4

MetaTrader 4 was released by MetaQuotes in 2005 and became the default retail forex platform within a few years. Two decades later it remains the single most common entry in a broker's platform list, despite a successor existing since 2010.

Why it won, and why it persists

The platform itself is unremarkable: nine timeframes, four pending order types, a serviceable charting package. What made it dominant was MQL4 and the ecosystem around it. Expert Advisors, custom indicators and scripts are written, sold, copied and inherited in enormous quantity, and a trader with a working EA has no reason to move to a platform that will not run it. Brokers face the mirror image of that: dropping MT4 costs them the clients whose systems depend on it.

The second reason is white-labelling. A broker licenses the server, brands the terminal and runs it. That made MT4 the cheapest way to launch a brokerage, which is why it appears at firms of wildly different quality — the platform tells you nothing about the broker behind it.

What it does well

  • Automation. The strategy tester, the EA framework and the volume of existing MQL4 code have no equivalent elsewhere.
  • Hedging. Opposing positions in the same instrument coexist, which many strategies assume. Note that US-regulated accounts cannot use it, under the NFA's FIFO rule.
  • Familiarity. The terminal is identical across brokers, so switching costs almost nothing.

Its real limits

  • Forex and CFDs only. There is no exchange-traded equity or futures support; MT5 was built for that.
  • The strategy tester models a single instrument and uses interpolated ticks unless carefully fed real data, so backtests flatter portfolio and multi-currency systems.
  • No native depth of market, and no built-in economic calendar.
  • MQL4 code does not run on MT5. Migration means a rewrite, which is the whole reason MT5 adoption took over a decade.

Its future

MetaQuotes has been steering brokers to MT5 for years and stopped issuing new MT4 licences, so the platform is maintained rather than developed. Existing installations continue to work and brokers show no urgency to retire them. For a trader starting now with no MQL4 code to preserve, MT5 or a modern web platform is the better place to begin; for anyone with a working system in MQL4, MT4 remains entirely serviceable.