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MT5

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Brokers offering MetaTrader 5 — the multi-asset successor to MT4, now the platform MetaQuotes actively develops.

Brokers supporting MT5

MetaTrader 5 arrived in 2010 as MetaQuotes' successor to MT4 and spent a decade in its shadow. It is now the platform the company actively develops, and the version most brokers put first.

The differences that matter

  • Multi-asset. MT5 was built to handle exchange-traded instruments — equities, futures, options — alongside forex and CFDs, with real exchange connectivity rather than CFD wrappers. MT4 cannot do this at all.
  • Depth of market. A native Level II order book, absent from MT4, which matters for anyone sizing orders against visible liquidity.
  • The strategy tester. Multi-threaded, multi-currency, capable of real-tick modelling and distributed across a network of agents. This is the largest practical upgrade: MT4's tester encourages backtests that cannot be trusted for portfolio systems, and MT5's does not.
  • More granularity. Twenty-one timeframes against nine, six pending order types against four, and a built-in economic calendar.
  • Account modes. MT5 supports both netting — one net position per instrument, as exchanges work — and hedging, which brokers enable for retail forex clients. MT4 offers hedging only.

The compatibility break

MQL5 is a different language from MQL4, closer to C++ in structure, and MT4 Expert Advisors do not run on MT5 without being rewritten. That single fact explains the slow adoption: the value of MT4 was never the terminal, it was the accumulated code, and MT5 could not inherit it. The MQL5 library has since grown large enough that this is no longer a serious obstacle for a trader starting today.

Choosing between them

If you hold working MQL4 systems, the cost of migration is real and MT4 still runs. If you are starting from scratch, MT5 is the better platform on every technical measure and the one that will keep receiving development. If you intend to trade anything beyond forex and CFDs, MT5 is the only one of the two that can.

A caution

As with MT4, MT5 is white-labelled: any broker can license it, brand it and run it. The platform says nothing whatsoever about the firm's regulation, its execution quality or its treatment of client money. Judge those separately.