What keeps MT4 relevant after two decades
MetaQuotes stopped issuing new MT4 licences some time ago, pushing brokers toward MT5. Yet most retail forex traders kept using MT4. The reason is simple: MT4 works, and people trust what works. More than a decade's worth of custom indicators, Expert Advisors, and community scripts were built for MT4. Migrating to MT5 means rewriting that entire library, and few people can't justify the effort.
I spent time testing MT4 and MT5 side by side, and the differences are less dramatic than the marketing suggests. MT5 has a few extras such as more timeframes and a built-in economic calendar, but chart functionality is nearly identical. For most retail strategies, there's no compelling reason to switch.
MT4 setup: what the manual doesn't tell you
The install process is quick. The part that trips people up is the setup after install. By default, MT4 shows four charts crammed into one window. Shut them all and open just the markets you follow.
Chart templates save time. Set up your usual indicators on one chart, then save it as a template. After that you can apply it to any new chart without redoing the work. Sounds trivial, but over months it saves hours.
A quick tweak that helps: go to Tools > Options > Charts and tick "Show ask line." By default MT4 displays the bid price by default, which makes buy entries seem misaligned by the spread amount.
MT4 strategy tester: honest expectations
MT4 comes with a backtester that lets you run Expert Advisors against historical data. Worth noting though: the quality of those results comes down to your tick data. Standard history data is interpolated, meaning it fills in missing ticks mathematically. For anything that needs accuracy, you need proper historical data.
Modelling quality matters more than the profit figure. Anything below 90% indicates the results aren't trustworthy. I've seen people post backtest results with 25% modelling quality and ask why live trading looks different.
Backtesting is where MT4 earns its reputation, but only if you feed it decent data.
MT4 indicators beyond the defaults
MT4 comes with 30 standard technical indicators. Few people use more than five or six. That said, where MT4 gets interesting lives in custom indicators written in MQL4. You can find a massive library, ranging from basic modifications to elaborate signal panels.
Installing them is straightforward: copy the .ex4 or .mq4 file into your MQL4/Indicators folder, restart MT4, and the indicator shows up in the Navigator panel. The catch is quality control. Free indicators vary wildly. A few are genuinely useful. Many haven't been updated since 2015 and will crash your terminal.
When adding third-party indicators, check when it was last updated and whether other traders have flagged problems. A poorly written indicator won't just give wrong signals — it can slow down your entire platform.
Risk management settings most MT4 traders ignore
There are a few native risk management tools that most traders don't bother with. Probably the most practical one is the maximum deviation setting in the order window. This controls how much slippage is acceptable on market orders. If you don't set it and you'll get whatever price comes through.
Stop losses go without saying, but trailing stops are underused. Right-click an open trade, choose Trailing Stop, and enter the pip amount. The stop moves with the trade goes in your favour. It won't suit every approach, but on trending pairs it takes away the need to sit and watch.
These settings take a minute to configure and they remove a lot of the emotional decision-making.
EAs on MT4: what to realistically expect
Automated trading through Expert Advisors attract traders for obvious reasons: set rules, let the code trade, walk away. In reality, a huge percentage of them fail to deliver over any decent time period. Those marketed using flawless equity curves are often over-optimised — they look great on the specific data they were tested on and break down the moment market conditions change.
None of this means all EAs are useless. A few people build custom EAs for well-defined entry rules: time-based entries, calculating lot sizes, or taking profit at set levels. These utility-type EAs work find more information because they do repetitive actions that don't require discretion.
Before running any EA with real money, run them on a demo account for no less than two to three months. Running it forward in real time reveals more than backtesting alone.
Using MT4 outside Windows
MT4 was built for Windows. Running it on Mac has always been compromises. Previously was emulation, which was functional but had visual bugs and stability problems. Certain brokers now offer native Mac apps using Crossover or similar wrappers, which is an improvement but still aren't built from scratch for Mac.
MT4 mobile, available for both iOS and Android, work well for keeping an eye on your account and managing trades on the move. Doing proper analysis on a phone screen doesn't really work, but adjusting a stop loss from your phone has saved plenty of traders.
Check whether your broker offers a native Mac build or just a wrapper — it makes a real difference day to day.