Building your practice
Platforms: MetaTrader 4 and 5
4 min
Your platform is the software you analyse and trade through. The two most common in retail forex are MetaTrader 4 and 5, and choosing between them depends on what you trade and how.
MetaTrader 4 (MT4)
The long-time industry standard, released in 2005 and still hugely popular — especially for automated trading.
- Lightweight, stable, and supported by almost every forex broker.
- Enormous ecosystem of expert advisors (robots) and custom indicators, written in the MQL4 language.
- Focused on forex and CFDs; limited beyond that.
- Genuinely showing its age, but its install base keeps it alive.
MetaTrader 5 (MT5)
The successor, not merely an upgrade — a different platform with the MQL5 language (not backward-compatible with MT4 robots).
- More timeframes and built-in indicators.
- Multi-asset: handles stocks, futures and more, not just forex.
- A far better strategy tester for backtesting, including multi-threaded and multi-currency testing.
- An economic calendar and depth-of-market built in.
Which to choose
- If you are buying or building a specific MT4 robot/indicator, you need MT4.
- For everything else — especially serious backtesting or trading beyond forex — MT5 is the better modern choice.
- In practice, your broker decides much of this: trade on whichever your regulated broker supports well.
This content is for educational and informational purposes only and is not investment, financial, tax or legal advice. Trading and investing carry risk, including the possible loss of capital. Any performance shown by third-party tools is hypothetical and not a promise of future results. Do your own research and consider professional advice before making any decision.