The MT4 platform is one of the most popular in the world, particularly for trading spot forex, and with over 15 million users worldwide its popularity continues to grow. There are many reasons for this, not least because it is free, available from virtually every broker around the world, and provides charting and brokerage execution on one simple package. Indeed, much of the attraction stems from its simplicity, and many traders use it purely in this capacity, with a more powerful charting package running alongside.
As a platform, MT4 is intuitive and easy to use, and increasingly brokers offering this platform are now broadening out their products, and adding additional instruments to the traditional spot forex market. These include some of the popular metals such as silver and gold, commodities such as oil and gas, and increasingly indices with equivalent contracts for US markets such as the Dow Jones, S & P 500 and Nasdaq 100, along with Uk markets including the Dax and the FTSE 100. This has further helped to increase the popularity of this platform.
From a development perspective, one of the major changes in the last few years was with the release of build 600, which saw the platform change dramatically from a programming perspective. In this release in 2014, a new directory structure was introduced, using the MQL4 folder structure which has now become the home for all third party software and indicators. In addition, the release also included a major update to the MQL4 coding language in order to bring MQL4 closer programmatically and in functionality to MQL5. The reason for this was simple to understand.
The MT4 platform is hugely successful, but this is not reflected with MT5 which has never been adopted on a worldwide basis. This release was the first step in the migration of the two products, which also included the Market tab for the first time on MT4. For companies such as ourselves this has made the transition from MT4 to MT5 more straightforward, and is certainly an upgrade path we are considering for the future. Indeed MT5 has many advantages not least in offering server side features, greater efficiency in managing multiple trading servers, and finally in offering a simple bridge for liquidity providers to the platform.
MetaQuotes hope is in moving the two platforms closer together and with an open market, this will encourage developers such as ourselves to invest the time and effort in porting MT4 applications and tools across to the MT5 platform. We will keep you posted and are always watching developments in this area, and as always welcome feedback and comments from you our customers on this issue.
