Anyone who’s into forex trading will undoubtedly have heard of MT4, which stands for MetaTrader 4. It’s the most popular forex trading platform out there, and for good reason. 

Unusually for a technology platform, it is 16 years old and continues to stand the test of time with users around the world and with all sorts of different experience levels. In today’s article, we wanted to provide our thoughts on the reason it’s still so popular 

MT4 was developed and released by MetaQuotes Software in 2005. Throughout its years of existence, it has since grown and made a name for itself as the leading platform in retail forex trading. Nowadays, millions of forex traders around the world use it regularly. 

Foreign exchange brokers like Fusion Markets are also licensed to provide MT4 for their clients. 

While primarily used for forex trading, it also lets a broker easily plug-in the ability to trade indices, cryptocurrency, and other asset classes such as commodities. Brokers like Fusion are offering over 120+ products on MT4.  It’s more than just your everyday exchange platform, though. It’s got excellent built-in charts for those who use technical analysis and its secret weapon, expert advisors are the most popular feature.

Expert Advisors are 3rd party automated trading systems. Something close to 70% of trades executed on MT4 are automated trades and their popularity continues to grow. Add in mobile apps for all platforms, in-built news (or trade ideas like Fusion offers), trading signals and much more, all of this works together to give you a more holistic look into the market to make well-informed trading decisions.

 Here are just a few reasons MT4 continues to remain as popular as ever.

When people think of trading in the financial markets, most people tend to picture sitting around and watching the screen all day.  

Forex is different in that it runs 24/5.  If there is one thing that keeps traders from switching to other trading platforms, it’s the availability of self-developed or 3rd party robots and expert advisors, essentially algorithms that run trading strategies around the clock. This means that forex traders can use programming to automatically execute deals for them when certain conditions are present. Let’s explain a little bit.

Technical analysis of forex trading is a deep topic. There are many methods of analyzing whether a particular currency is worth buying or selling. Among these include moving averages, convergences, and chart patterns. We won’t go into technical analysis in this article but suffice to say that there’s a lot to consider if we want to confirm if a trade should be taken or not. Monitoring different currencies using multiple methods can be exhausting in the forex market, where global currencies are traded 24/5.

Manually monitoring multiple charts is also slow and cumbersome because humans have a limit on how fast they can read and analyze data. That’s where MT4’s automated trading comes in. Using predefined lines of code, the trading robots can scan thousands, of forex markets and check to see if the forex trader’s predefined buy or sell conditions are met. Bridgewater, one of the world’s largest hedge funds uses over 100 million data points. Good luck trying to beat that with just your brain alone. With automated systems like EAs, while those off the shelf are unlikely to have as many data points as Bridgewater, these will still be faster than any human could be.

In forex trading, prices can change in the blink of an eye. Thus, the traders who can execute a deal as fast as possible protect themselves from market fluctuations. Those who prefer to just rely on the wisdom and experience of the more seasoned forex traders can use MT4’s signal trading feature, which basically lets them copy all or some of someone else’s trading moves on the platform. It does this automatically.

Alternatively, you can utilise Fusion’s own copy trading platform, Fusion+. By using MT4’s trading robots, forex traders can just input their commands and let the algorithms/EAs do the heavy lifting.  

Humans are innately social creatures. We want to do what others do, and we want what others have. It’s a convenient way to make ourselves feel secure and validated. If everyone uses a particular forex trading software, others will soon hop in. Network effects refer to technology platforms and refer to the concept that the more users that are on the platform, the stronger the platform becomes. Think about it. No one wants to use Facebook if there are no friends you know on there. Therefore, the more people that use MT4, the more trading groups, videos and resources there will be, the more robots that developers will build for the platform and so on.

According to MetaQuotes, the developer of MT4, the platform now has millions of users and continues to grow. A large part of this is thanks to existing network effects which can be difficult for other platforms to overcome. There are thousands of brokers out there offering MT4 to their clients. Again, the more brokers that offer it, the more newly established forex brokers feel like they have to. For any new broker looking to come into the business, MT4 is the first service they think of because the rest of the business uses it too. Even ‘legacy’ brokers from the 1970’s such as IG have launched a version of MT4. Basically, if a forex trader is not using MT4, they will at least have heard of it. This increases the chances that they will eventually use the platform themselves if speaking to other traders they know.

The whole platform ecosystem becomes like a flywheel and makes it hard for other platforms serving the same market to compete with. 

Despite being a forex trading platform, MT4 does a splendid job at making things simple and easy to learn for its users. Remember the trading robots we talked about? They can all be purchased in MT4’s own Market. Users don’t have to scour the Internet looking for the best trading robot because MT4 has thousands of available ones in their selection.

MT4 also offers many trading tools, like market orders, pending orders, and stop orders, which any trader can appreciate. The platform offers 23 analytical objects and 30 technical indicators, along with interactive charts and timeframes to give forex traders all the information that they’ll need right at their fingertips. There’s also mobile trading with MT4. By now, we already know that the forex market runs 24/5, but not all of us are in front of our computers all the time. When we’re out doing something else, the only “computer” we really have is our phone.

Finally, MT4 also gives users relevant alerts and financial news to prepare for unexpected price movements. Developing a platform can take years of hard work, mistakes along the way and more. With MT4 you get reliability more than anything else. The bugs have been ironed out and while

we know it’s not the best-looking platform on the market, it is rock-solid and runs on almost every device such as Windows, Mac, iOS, Androids and tablets.  

With Fusion, we have always tried to use the best from day one.  

We are obsessed with making your trading experience better than any other MT4 broker out there.  
 
We launched with strong liquidity providers to undercut our competition and provide a lower cost of trade than other brokers before us. We built tools to help manage your account easily and with a simple interface. For example, we spend a lot of our resources on building tools to make your trading life easier and provide a unique trading experience. Things like the ‘my performance’ feature, Fusion+ copy trading and more.   

Summing it up 

In essence, MT4 is like an all-in-one platform for accessing the world’s largest markets. Those interested in the markets can choose a low-cost broker with no minimum deposit like Fusion and be up and running within five minutes. Not sure how, what or when to trade? You can trade with robots and EAs, follow other successful traders via Fusion+, or if you’re keen to learn yourself, then gain access to more resources like videos and trading communities than any other platform available today.  

It’s no wonder that MT4 has reached the level of popularity it currently has. Fast, reliable, filled and filled with something for everyone, it’s no surprise so many people around the world are using it. It’s also hard to see when it might be knocked off the top spot.