MT4 after twenty years: an honest take on the platform
Why traders still pick MT4 over newer platforms
MetaQuotes stopped issuing new MT4 licences years ago, nudging brokers toward MT5. Yet most retail forex traders kept using MT4. The reason is simple: MT4 has twenty years of muscle memory behind it. More than a decade's worth of custom indicators, Expert Advisors, and community scripts only work with MT4. Moving to MT5 means rewriting that entire library, and few people would rather keep trading than recoding.
After testing both platforms side by side, and the differences are less dramatic than the marketing suggests. MT5 adds a few extras like more timeframes and a built-in economic calendar, but the core charting feels very similar. For most retail strategies, MT4 is more than enough.
MT4 setup: what the manual doesn't tell you
Downloading and installing MT4 is the easy part. The part that trips people up is getting everything configured correctly. Out of the box, MT4 opens with four charts squeezed onto one window. Close all of them and start fresh with the pairs you actually trade.
Chart templates save time. Build your go-to indicators once, then right-click and save as template. From there you can load it onto other charts in two clicks. Small thing, but over months it saves hours.
A quick tweak that helps: go to Tools > Options > Charts and check "Show ask line." The default view is the bid price by default, which can make your entries look off by the spread amount.
MT4 strategy tester: honest expectations
MT4 comes with a backtester that lets you run Expert Advisors against historical data. Worth noting though: the quality of those results comes down to your tick data. Standard history data from MetaQuotes is interpolated, meaning the tester fills gaps using algorithms. If you're testing something more precise than a quick look, download third-party tick data.
That quality percentage in the results is more important than the bottom-line PnL. Below 90% indicates the results are probably misleading. Traders sometimes share screenshots with 25% modelling quality and can't figure out why their live results don't match.
The strategy tester is one of MT4's stronger features, but only if you feed it decent data.
Building your own MT4 indicators
MT4 comes with 30 built-in technical indicators. Most traders never touch them all. However the real depth lives in user-built indicators coded in MQL4. You can find over 2,000 options, covering everything from tweaked versions of standard tools to complex multi-timeframe dashboards.
The install process is painless: drop the .ex4 or .mq4 file into the MQL4/Indicators folder, reboot MT4, and you'll find it in the Navigator panel. The risk is reliability. Community indicators are hit-and-miss. Some are genuinely useful. Others haven't been updated since 2015 and may crash your terminal.
Before installing anything, verify the last update date and if users mention bugs. A broken indicator doesn't only show wrong data — it can slow down the whole terminal.
Managing risk properly inside MT4
MT4 has several built-in risk management features that the majority of users don't bother with. The most useful is the maximum deviation setting in the trade metatrader 4 execution window. This controls how much slippage is acceptable on market orders. Without this configured and you'll get whatever price comes through.
Everyone knows about stop losses, but MT4's trailing stop feature are overlooked. Right-click an open trade, choose Trailing Stop, and set your preferred distance. It follows with price moves into profit. Doesn't work well in choppy markets, but if you're riding trends it removes the temptation to micromanage the trade.
These settings take a minute to configure and they remove a lot of the emotional decision-making.
Running Expert Advisors: practical expectations
Automated trading through Expert Advisors attract traders for obvious reasons: program your strategy and stop staring at charts. In practice, a huge percentage of them underperform over any decent time period. EAs advertised with flawless equity curves are usually fitted to past data — they look great on historical data and fall apart the moment market conditions change.
None of this means all EAs are worthless. A few people build personal EAs for one particular setup: entering at a specific time, calculating lot sizes, or taking profit at set levels. That kind of automation are more reliable because they execute mechanical tasks where you don't need discretion.
When looking at Expert Advisors, test on demo first for at least two to three months. Live demo testing tells you more than historical results ever will.
MT4 beyond the desktop
MT4 is a Windows application at heart. Mac users face a workaround. The traditional approach was emulation, which mostly worked but introduced visual bugs and occasional crashes. A few brokers now offer native Mac apps using compatibility layers, which are better but still aren't built from scratch for Mac.
On mobile, available for both iOS and Android, are surprisingly capable for monitoring your account and making quick adjustments. Serious charting work on a 5-inch screen is pushing it, but managing exits while away from your desk is worth having.
Look into whether your broker has a proper macOS version or just Wine under the hood — the difference in stability is noticeable.