The world of forex trading and MetaTrader is defined by important decisions. The decisions that you make as a trader will ultimately be the difference between being a successful and profitable trader and one who sustains losses. As traders we are making decisions all the time. And one of those decisions is picking the right trading platform.
And just like all the other decisions you make in life, when there is a chance to make a decision, then it means there are options to choose from. In the case of trading platform for the forex market, there are a number of choices. But perhaps none come close to the ever popular platforms MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5.
Of course you might have guessed that these two are only two versions of the same platform. Sharing fundamental similarities, it is the small differences that you need to pay attention to. So in this article we will review both of these platforms and see which one is better.
What Is MetaTrader?
Before we discuss the differences between MT 4 and MT 5, we first need to take a look at what this platform is in order to gain a general understanding.
As you might know MetaTrader is a trading platform. In fact, it is the most well-known and highly popular platform among all traders from different markets, including the foreign exchange market or forex.
So what do trading platforms do? Such platforms are essentially software or applications that provide and facilitate the chance to trade in the forex market. You can also look at them as links between you and your broker. Because as you know, brokers are the companies that execute the final trades in the market. The trading platform is the software that allows you to send your directives and trading requests to the broker for them to execute.
Because of this importance that a trading platform has, there are matters related to compatibility that ought to be taken into account. This means when you are picking your broker or rather when you are picking your trading platform, you need to make sure that these two are compatible with each other. This is why when you want to register with a broker, you are given a list of the trading platforms that the broker is compatible with.
One of the biggest advantages of the MetaTrader platform is that it is compatible with almost all well-known forex brokers.
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A Cursory Glance at MetaTrader 4 and 5
One last point of discussion before we compare MetaTrader 4 and 5. Let’s take a look at these platforms separately and see what each has come to be.
First off, MetaTrader 4 is the trading platform that has been developed and released back in 2005. The interesting thing about MT 4 is that back at the time of its release it was specifically developed for the foreign exchange market or forex.
It has been more than 19 years since that time, and during this time MT 4 has proven itself to be the most popular platform for trading among participants in financial markets.
Then there is MT 5. This trading platform is unofficially known to be the next version for MT 4. But the thing is that MetaTrader 5 should not be regarded as the updated version of MetaTrader 4. Rather it should be taken as a whole separate trading platform with its own features and capabilities.
Now in the next section we will compare and contrast these two platforms with each other. But if there is one thing to know about the MetaTrader platform as a whole is that this trading platform is overall very user-friendly and allows traders to customize many of its features according to their own preferences to personalize it.
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Comparing the MetaTrader Platforms
Now the big question is the difference between these two MetaTrader platforms. What are their differences? Which one is better? One really important matter to keep in mind before we compare these two platforms is that they share a lot of the same features. In fact they share many of their fundamental aspects.
With that in mind, here are the most important differences between MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5:
- Number of indicators: first of all, MT4 and MT5 offer a different number of indicators. MT4 offers 30 indicators and MT5 provides their users with 38 indicators, thus giving them more freedom in the matter of technical and market analysis.
- Number of graphical objects: another important point of difference is the number graphical objects, which are used as drawing tools. As such with a higher number of graphical objects, MT5 is more suitable for drawing on the charts and such purposes.
- Economic calendar: this is a feature that has been made available in MT5. With the help of this feature, traders will be able to track important economic events easier.
- Community chat: this is yet another feature found in MT5 but not seen with MT4. Community chat can be a very valuable and important feature especially when you consider the value of a community in the world of trading.
- Timeframes: one last point of contrast that we want to discuss about MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 are timeframes. This is another area where we see improvement in MT5 compared to its predecessor MT4, with the number of timeframes increasing from 9 to 21.
Conclusion
MetaTrader 4 and 5 are two of the most popular trading platforms. While they share many of the fundamental features, they do have some differences as well. So when traders want to pick one of them they need to consider these differences and how they influence their trading process. In this article we discussed these two trading platforms and the differences between them so that you can see which one is better.
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