MetaTrader 5 — what's better than MT4?

MetaTrader 5 launched in 2010 as the successor to MT4, and for its first few years most traders treated it as a curiosity — everyone stayed on the fourth version anyway. That has now flipped. MetaQuotes has not sold MT4 licences to new brokers for years now, most brokers offer MT5 as the default to new clients, and the technical gap between the two platforms has stopped being cosmetic. If you are opening an account today and carry no legacy scripts, MT5 is simply the more sensible starting point. Here is exactly where it wins — and where MT4 still has a case.

Why has MT5 become the default platform for new traders?

The simplest answer is that MT4 is now closed for development while MT5 is alive. MetaQuotes keeps the fourth version running mostly out of momentum and because of the huge installed base of existing accounts, but new features, fixes and successive builds go to MT5. For a beginner that means something concrete: you are learning a tool that will still be updated five years from now, not one the maker is quietly winding down.

The second layer is the range of markets. MT4 was built around forex and CFD trading — and in that role it still holds up. MT5 was designed as a multi-asset platform: alongside currencies and CFDs it handles stocks, futures and indices from a single window — provided your broker actually offers those instruments. If you ever want to add US stocks or CME futures to your currency trading, on MT4 you would have to find a separate program. On MT5 you stay in the same interface.

How much more does MT5 give you in day-to-day chart work?

The differences show up the moment you launch it. MT5 offers 21 timeframes against 9 in MT4 — the additions include M2, M3, M4, M6, M10, M12, M20, H2, H3, H6, H8 and H12. This is not a gadget: a scalper can work on M4 instead of jumping between M1 and M5, and a swing trader appreciates H6 or H8 where before there was only H4 and D1. There is also a richer order set — according to the official specification MT5 offers two types of market orders, six types of pending orders and two stop orders, plus the option of partial order execution. MT4 has clearly fewer.

Three things MT4 simply does not have, but which you get as standard on MT5, are a built-in economic calendar, Depth of Market and an order-book window for exchange-traded instruments. The calendar sits in the Toolbox panel and shows upcoming releases tagged by impact, so you no longer have to keep a separate tab open with an external macro calendar. Depth of Market shows the pending orders waiting at successive price levels — for a scalper and a futures trader that is concrete liquidity information, not decoration. While you are there, it is worth mastering the MT4 and MT5 keyboard shortcuts — they save several seconds on every order.

How do MQL5 and strategy testing beat MT4?

Under the hood of both platforms sits a programming language for automated strategies. MT4 uses MQL4, which is procedural; MT5 uses MQL5, an object-oriented language with classes, inheritance and polymorphism, compiled to faster code. In practice, for the author of an automated strategy (Expert Advisor) that means cleaner, more maintainable code and quicker execution of complex algorithms.

The clearest gap is in the strategy tester. MT4 tests on a single symbol and with interpolated ticks — the result can flatter you, because the platform invents movement between data points. MT5 tests across multiple symbols at once, uses a real-tick mode for the highest accuracy and can distribute optimisation across the MQL5 Cloud Network. As the MetaQuotes documentation puts it, optimisations that would normally take months can be finished by a network of agents in a few hours. If you care about an honest strategy backtest, that is not cosmetics — it is a different league.

What about account mode — hedging or netting?

This is one of the less obvious but important differences. MT4 works in hedging mode only: you can hold a long and a short position on the same pair at the same time. MT5 lets you choose between two modes when you open the account. Hedging behaves like MT4 — each trade is a separate position. Netting mode collapses every trade on a given instrument into one net position, just like a stock account. Which one you see depends on the broker and the jurisdiction — in the US netting is the standard, while in the European Union both are sometimes available. While you are at it, it helps to get clear on order types, because they decide how a position comes into being in the first place.

The argument running through the standard programming manual for the platform is that MT5's substantive gains over its predecessor are the ability to trade several asset classes from one terminal and a markedly more capable strategy tester. — Andrew R. Young, Expert Advisor Programming for MetaTrader 5, Edgehill Publishing, 2018 (paraphrase)

When does MT4 still make sense?

To be fair: MT5 does not win everything. The strongest argument for the fourth version is its back catalogue — over more than a decade the community wrote an enormous library of ready-made indicators and automated strategies in MQL4, and some brokers and forums still revolve mainly around MT4. If you have a specific, working Expert Advisor written for MQL4, porting it to MQL5 is not trivial: the event-handling functions changed, some predefined variables disappeared, and buffer indexing works differently. The MetaQuotes documentation describes this plainly as a migration process, not an automatic conversion. For someone with a large stock of old code, that is a real cost.

The crux, though, is the starting point. If you carry no MQL4 code at all, the whole "MT4 library" advantage stops applying to you — you are starting from zero either way, so you may as well start on the newer, faster and broader tool. If you want the two platforms compared point by point, I lay it out in detail in MT4 vs MT5 in 2026, and I cover an alternative from outside the MetaQuotes ecosystem in the cTrader versus MT5 comparison. I also keep a broader tour of platforms and trader tooling on ForexMechanics.

What to do tomorrow

1. Open a free MT5 demo account with your broker and spend an hour on the interface alone — lay your charts out across several of the 21 timeframes, open the Toolbox panel and find the built-in economic calendar inside it, so you can see how much time you save by not switching between windows.
2. Launch the Strategy Tester in real-tick mode and run a simple test on three pairs at once, for example on EUR/USD, GBP/USD and USD/JPY — you will see in practice the multi-currency test that MT4 physically cannot perform, and you will feel the difference in result accuracy.
3. If you run an account with existing MQL4 strategies, before you move anything, write down a list of your indicators and Expert Advisors and estimate the cost of migrating them to MQL5 — only with that number in hand should you decide whether switching now pays off or whether it is better to wait.
4. When you open an MT5 account, deliberately choose hedging or netting mode to match your style, and if you plan to trade around macro data, set the calendar filter to high-impact releases so you do not accidentally enter the market right before a print such as the NFP report.