Monday, January 13, 2014

Metatrader | Is This Still A Good Platform?

Hello everyone! today I will discuss the metatrader trading platform by Metaquotes. This platform has been around for quite some time now. It is still considered cutting edge I suppose, but I find it flawed in some areas, you can expect numerous updates. There is a strong community of traders that support the development of expert advisors, which is why so many traders will be using this for quite some time to come. The current version is 4 or MT4. There is a MT5 that has been in development for awhile now.

MetaTrader 4 combines an accessible, user-friendly interface with a wide range of powerful of functions, making it a highly flexible platform. It enables to easily and efficiently manage the set-up of traders' groups, financial instruments, databases, data feeders and many others. The Introducing Brokers (IB) service is also available. With MetaTrader 4, you can easily set up an efficient network of your company branches and manage it with a great deal of accuracy.

There are also numerous plug-ins and scripts to automate just about anything you wish. This I believe is one of the platforms strongest suits. Below is a flow chart on how the terminals are set-up.


You can also perform historical backtesting on MT4 dating back over 20 years. At time of writing though you cannot perform tickdata backtesting unless you import the data from a broker(which can be a tedious task), which is much more accurate than 90% modeling quality backtesting.

I really hope that development of the MT5 platform takes off soon, as I have heard it is less "buggy" and much quicker when performing tasks. Let's see how long the MT4 platform lives.