Forex Traders using retail brokers know MetaQuotes Software Corp.’s trading platforms in all countries worldwide. MT4 and MT5 are their current products with focus on MT5. Although many people assume that MetaTrader 5 is only an upgraded version of the previous platform, the terminals have a significant differences.
In contrast to MT4, MT5 is an all-in-one tool that can be used to trade both currencies and the stock market. There are some distinctions between MetaTrader5 and MetaTrader4 because of their different application capabilities. Let’s look into what is the difference between MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5.
The basics about MT4:
The platform is designed for forex trading—financial instruments – CFD on currencies, stocks, stock indices, assets of commodity markets, cryptocurrencies.
MetaTrader 4 is a single-threaded platform for any windows computer system from windows 7+
This is paralelle processing vs MT5 can process multiple requests simultaneously
MT4 has several benefits, including:
Functionality. The software has three order execution options, nine order types, 30 built-in technical indicators, and nine timeframes to choose from when placing orders.
The MQL4 language Scripts, advisors, and indicators may all be customized on the platform. MetaEditor may be used to construct them.
It supports standard time frames only.
Tester availability is a crucial consideration. This is only possible with paid plugins and limited tick data. It is also only able to process in-line backtests. MT5 can maximize each core of your CPU and add extra workers from your local networked windows computers or from the MQL5 cloud (paid)
MetaTrader 5 details
Despite all the new features and enhancements, traders did not embrace MT5 as readily as MT4. Because 2 Major factors:
#1 Brokers were forced to pay high prices from MT5 Licenses, they require more expensive servers.
#2 Expert Advisor developers are not building in MT5 for a variety of reasons, mostly because most EA’s on the Marketplace are copies of each other and worthless.
MT5 benefits
Technical analysis, testing, and order execution have been improved in MetaTrader 5 by its creators.
MT5 vs MT4 Top 5 benefits of using MT5 and why it will payoff for you
#1 connections to the broker are typically faster – better for market orders
#2 More indicators and time frames are available, depending on your strategy, this is an advantage over MT4
#3 Parallel processing. EA traders with multiple orders opening and closing, indicators reading, publishing functions, importing data etc – this is all done instantly with the multi-threaded power of MT5. Not available on MT4
#4 Superior backtesting – MT5 can backtest exponentially faster than MT4. Example if you have a Quad Core Processors (4 cores) MT5 with backtest 4X faster then MT4.
#5 Your broker tick-data! Not available in MT4, you can download your brokers tick by tick history and backtest directly on your terminal. This is critical for expert advisors.
With all this backtesting you can easily replicate our performance
To see all the changes with MetaTrader 5 – the changelog is great