MT4 after twenty years: an honest take on the platform

What keeps MT4 relevant after two decades

MetaQuotes stopped issuing new MT4 licences years ago, nudging brokers toward MT5. Still, most retail forex traders kept using MT4. The reason is straightforward: MT4 has twenty years of muscle memory behind it. Thousands of custom indicators, Expert Advisors, and community scripts were built for MT4. Moving to MT5 means rewriting that entire library, and most traders don't see the point.

After testing both platforms side by side, and the differences are marginal for most strategies. MT5 adds a few extras including more timeframes and a built-in economic calendar, but chart functionality feels about the same. For most retail strategies, there's no compelling reason to switch.

Setting up MT4 without the usual headaches

Downloading and installing MT4 is the easy part. What actually causes problems is getting everything configured correctly. By default, MT4 opens with four charts crammed more articles into the screen. Close all of them and start fresh with the instruments you care about.

Templates are worth setting up early. Build your usual indicators once, then right-click and save as template. After that you can load it onto other charts instantly. Minor detail, but over time it saves hours.

A quick tweak that helps: open Tools > Options > Charts and check "Show ask line." MT4 only shows the bid price on the chart, which makes entries appear wrong until you realise the ask price is hidden.

MT4 strategy tester: honest expectations

The strategy tester in MT4 lets you run Expert Advisors against historical data. Worth noting though: the accuracy of those results depends entirely on your tick data. Built-in history data is not real tick data, meaning it fills in missing ticks with made-up prices. For anything that needs accuracy, download real tick data from a provider like Dukascopy.

Modelling quality matters more than the headline profit number. If it's under 90% means the results are probably misleading. Traders sometimes post backtest results with 25% modelling quality and can't figure out why their live results don't match.

Backtesting is where MT4 earns its reputation, but the output is only useful with quality tick data.

Custom indicators on MT4: worth the effort?

MT4 comes with 30 built-in technical indicators. The average trader uses maybe a handful. That said, the real depth comes from custom indicators written in MQL4. The MQL5 marketplace alone has thousands available, ranging from tweaked versions of standard tools to complex multi-timeframe dashboards.

Installing them is straightforward: place the .ex4 or .mq4 file into the MQL4/Indicators folder, refresh MT4, and it appears in the Navigator panel. The catch is quality control. Publicly shared indicators range from excellent to broken. A few are well coded and maintained. Some stopped working years ago and can freeze your terminal.

When adding third-party indicators, check when it was last updated and whether users have flagged problems. Bad code doesn't only show wrong data — it can freeze your entire platform.

Risk management settings most MT4 traders ignore

MT4 has a few native risk management tools that a lot of people don't bother with. First worth mentioning is the maximum deviation setting in the order window. This defines the amount of slippage you're willing to tolerate on market orders. Without this configured and you'll get whatever price the broker gives you.

Stop losses go without saying, but the trailing stop function are worth exploring. Right-click an open trade, select Trailing Stop, and define your preferred distance. Your stop loss adjusts when price moves your way. It won't suit every approach, but if you're riding trends it takes away the temptation to stare at the screen.

You can configure all of this in under five minutes and they remove a lot of the emotional decision-making.

Running Expert Advisors: practical expectations

Expert Advisors on MT4 have obvious appeal: define your rules and let the machine execute. The reality is, most EAs underperform over any decent time period. Those marketed using incredible historical results are often curve-fitted — they look great on the specific data they were tested on and stop working once the market does something different.

That doesn't mean all EAs are a waste of time. Certain traders build personal EAs for specific, narrow tasks: opening trades at session opens, calculating lot sizes, or exiting positions at set levels. That kind of automation tend to work because they do defined operations without needing interpretation.

If you're evaluating EAs, test on demo first for no less than two to three months. Running it forward in real time is more informative than backtesting alone.

Using MT4 outside Windows

MT4 was built for Windows. Running it on Mac face a workaround. The traditional approach was running it through Wine, which was functional but came with visual bugs and occasional crashes. Some brokers now offer macOS versions using Wine under the hood, which are better but still aren't built from scratch for Mac.

MT4 mobile, on both Apple and Android devices, are genuinely useful for watching your account and managing trades on the move. Full analysis on a 5-inch screen doesn't really work, but adjusting a stop loss from your phone has saved plenty of traders.

It's worth confirming if your broker provides a native Mac build or just a wrapper — it makes a real difference day to day.