MT4 vs MT5

Metatrader

Both MT4 and MT5 are developed by MetaQuotes, a well-known Russian software company, and are software suitable for foreign exchange trading. MT4 was officially released on July 1, 2005, while MT5 was officially launched on June 1, 2010.

Starting at the end of 2016, MetaQuotes has fully promoted the MT5 platform through a number of decisions, including no longer upgrading MT4, increasing technical support service fees, and suspending the MT4 platform authorization letter.

Read on to find out how MT5 adds to the functionality of MT4, and what new features it brings.

Improved Functionality

The company behind MT4 and MT5, Metaquotes Software, believes in “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” However, they believe in improving what’s already there.

More than just forex trading

MT4 is specially designed for Forex traders. But as brokerages continue to add more markets to their roster of financial instruments to meet the growing demands of their clients, trading platforms have also had to expand. MT5 is now a more versatile trading platform for traders and investors looking to diversify their investments.

With MT5, you can trade stocks, futures, options and bonds. The platform can also connect you to more than 80 exchanges around the world. These include the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange (DGCX) and the Moscow Exchange (MOEX).

Pending Order Type

A pending order is basically an instruction that you provide to your broker about which position to buy or sell. There are four types of pending orders on MT4–rebound long, breakthrough long, rebound short and breakthrough short. MT5 has added two types of pending orders–breakthrough rebound long and breakthrough rebound short.

Break through the rebound and go long as a stop loss order for the rebound to go long. Once the future asking price reaches the specified stop loss level, a pending order to rebound and go long will be placed in the breakthrough price area.

The stop loss level is set above the bid price, while the stop break rebound price is set below the stop loss level. The same principle applies to breaking through the rebound and shorting, but the bid price is used as the limit price, not the ask price.

Technical Indicators

MT5 provides traders with a wide set of tools. Compared with the 30 indicators of MT4, MT5 has 38. MT5 divides these indicators into five different groups—trend, oscillation, volume, Bill Williams and a custom group where you can store indicators developed or imported by yourself. This new indicator group system allows you to use more indicators more easily and quickly. The new indicators include：

Trend Indicator

Double exponential moving average
Three-exponential moving average

Oscillator

Three-index average

Bill Williams

Market Facilitation Index

These additives provide traders with a wider range of tools that they can use to analyze trends and make more informed decisions, leading to better trading.

MT5 also has an extended list of analytical objects that help determine the price trends of financial instruments. MT4 provides 31 analytical objects, and MT5 has 44 analytical objects, including lines, drawing channels, Gann tools, shapes, arrows, Fibonacci, and Eliot.

Cycle

MT5 offers a wider range of cycles (21 in total!). In addition to the 9 periods available on MT4 (1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month), MT5 also has the following time periods: 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 4 minutes, 6 minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes, 20 minutes, 2 hours, 3 hours, 6 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours.

With MT5, you have more flexibility to set the period interval, allowing you to see the market from different angles.

Strategy Tester

One disadvantage of MT4 is that it only allows you to test expert advisors (EAS) on one currency at a time. Using MT5, you can test EAS on multiple currencies and analyze multiple currencies and their correlation at the same time.

EA testing and optimization are also done using real price fluctuations to make the trader’s simulation as close to the real market conditions as possible.

With this improved feature, you can better prepare and understand your strategy and make better plans for your future trading.

Emails with attachments

MT5 provides users with access to email services and the ability to send and receive attachments. Attachments feature is not available on MT4.

New Features

Of course, if the upgraded trading platform does not have brand new features of the system, what will it look like? Here are some new features of MT5：

Economic Calendar

A new feature on MT5 is the built-in economic calendar, which is not available on MT4. Similar to ordinary calendars or news resources that provide information about things around us and when they occur, economic calendars provide users with information about macroeconomic events.

Using the MT5 economic calendar, you can check the reported time, tools that may be affected, the importance of the event, forecast figures, previous figures, and actual figures. These features enable you to keep abreast of the latest events and respond immediately.

For day traders, the economic calendar is a good tool to help reduce trading risks, because as the market fluctuates, the economic calendar will tell you whether you should take action.

Built-in MQL5 community chat

MT5 allows you to monitor the market and perform trading operations while communicating with other traders in the community. With this new feature, both novices and professionals can benefit from sharing their experiences.

Order filling strategy

If in the MT4 filling or termination strategy, the order will be cancelled without the required quantity, then in MT5, you can use several other currently available quotes to fill your order. In addition, you can also set other order execution conditions on MT5.

Immediate or cancel: When an order cannot be completely filled, no matter how many quantities the order has, it will be filled, and the remaining quantities will be cancelled.
Refund: Applicable to limit and breakthrough orders and market orders. This strategy allows the remaining quantity of some full orders to be further processed instead of cancelled.

Unilateral position

A new feature of MT5 is the unilateral position holding mode. This means that you can have an account that allows only one symbol’s public location at any given time.

Both MT4 and MT5 provide hedging and holding modes. The unilateral holding mode does not allow users to buy and sell transactions at the same time. This means that when you execute a transaction in the same direction, the transaction volume will increase. On the contrary, transactions in the opposite direction will result in a decrease in trading volume.

For example, if you go long for one lot of EURUSD, and then place a second lot order for another batch of the same pair, the initial order will automatically become two lots of long EURUSD transactions, not two separate transactions.

Market Depth

Finally, traders can take advantage of MT5’s new tool market depth. Market depth can help traders understand the liquidity depth of a financial market.

By referring to the market depth window, you can see how many orders (liquidity) and prices are on the market. This helps you understand the level of clearing of different currencies at different times, and is especially useful for those who adopt scalping trading strategies.

MT5 has been significantly improved over the popular MT4, which is why we encourage traders of all levels to start jumping. After all, MT5 is a sustainable trading platform that will serve you into the distant future.

MT4 is a foreign exchange-based software produced by MetaQuotes Software Company. The characteristic of this software is that it runs relatively fast, data can be downloaded, and charts and data are longer. Favored by many foreign exchange companies and traders. At present, more than 100 foreign exchange brokerage companies and banks from 30 countries around the world have chosen MT4 software as an online trading platform. MT4 is a very excellent software that combines the three functions of market charts, technical analysis, and order trading!

MT5
MT4

Feature	MT5	MT4
Feature	Feature
Execution mode	4	3
Number of order execution modes supported by the platform
64-bit version This machine supports 64-bit architecture
Server architecture Platform underlying server architecture	Decentralized	Single
Account group The number of trader account groups that can be created in the platform	unlimited	512
Security group Number of financial instrument groups supported by the platform	unlimited	32
Built-in order routing Local routing options, allowing management of transaction request processing rules
Order database: The size of the maximum order database size that does not affect the performance of the platform	unlimited	Up to 10 million orders
Report: Background and central office internal report formats supported by the platform	Chart (HTML5) + form	Form only
Balance transaction type : Types of balance transactions supported by the platform	Balance, credit, correction, fees, bonuses, commissions, agency, interest	Balance, credit
Log file ZIP compression : ZIP compression of statistical log files, the server records all actions and events performed	Automation
SQL export : Native real-time export to SQL database	Native（MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle）	Limited (MySQL）
Manager API Manager API : Supported programming languages, which can realize the integration of the platform and the agent system	C++, ASP.Net, PHP	C++
Gateway API : Support gateway API, which can realize the integration of the platform and the trading system
Reporting API : Access to the reporting API allows to enhance the reporting capabilities of the trading server
Partial order execution policy : The availability of partial order execution options, in which a transaction with the maximum trading volume available on the market is executed, which does not exceed the requested trading volume in the order, and the outstanding trading volume is cancelled
Order transaction policy : Order fulfillment policy-you can set additional order execution conditions	Fill in or terminate immediately Or cancel Return	Fill or kill
Pending order type : The type of pending order requesting the broker to buy or sell financial securities under pre-defined conditions in the future	6	4
Market depth : Market depth option, providing bids and bids for financial securities at different prices based on trading volume
Time & Sales (Exchange data) : Ability to receive data about Time & Sales from Exchange
Technical Indicators : It can automatically detect patterns in the price dynamics of financial instruments to help users make trading decisions.	38	30
Graphic objects : The number of analytical objects that help to identify financial instrument price trends, detection cycles and support/resistance levels, establish channels, etc.	44	31
TimeFrame : Quantity-the time interval for grouping quotes of financial instruments	21	9
Economic Calendar Economic Calendar : Availability—basic analysis tools, which contain publications of macroeconomic indicators of various countries, which may affect the price of financial instruments
Email system : The built-in e-mail service function enables users to receive important information from brokers directly in the platform	With accessories	Without accessories
Between accounts : Transfer of funds The possibility of transferring funds between accounts within the same trading server
Charging machine mql5. Community Directory : You can chat with other traders directly in the platform
Strategy test : The built-in strategy tester supports the testing and optimization mode of trading robots	Multithreading +Multiple currencies +Real quotation	Single thread
Multilingual Unicode : Support Unicode character encoding standard to ensure that characters and symbols in any language are displayed correctly
Net settlement(netting) : Support the netting accounting system, only open positions in one financial instrument are allowed to be held
Hedging accounting system Support, allowing multiple positions in financial instruments in the same and opposite directions
Trading symbol Number of financial instruments that can be traded on the platform	Unlimited	1024
Supported markets : Financial market, platform users can trade on it	Foreign Exchange/CFD/Futures/ Options/stocks/bonds	FOREX/CFD
Exchange trading : Support the exchange market and provide trading of stocks, futures, bonds and options
	Buy Now	Buy Now

For many years, forex traders have been wondering when MT5 will replace the MT4 platform and what this process will look like. Well, this day has arrived. In November 2016, MQ announced that MT5 will soon replace the MT4 client. They will no longer provide support for MT4.