2020 MetaTrader 5 Review • Pros, Cons & More • Benzinga

Your headaches over zeroing in on the right investment could be solved the minute you use MetaTrader 5. A good trading software will not only facilitate order placement but will provide you with the right tools, features and research to identify opportunities and keep track of the performance of your portfolio. MetaTrader 5 fits the bill.

Advanced Traders: MetaTrader 5’s multi-asset, multi-functional platform is a better fit if you’re an advanced trader. It allows you to work with multiple accounts with different brokers. The platform provides price data, allows the use of a special type of non-tradable assets such as physical gold to provide margin for open positions of other instruments and create custom financial symbols.

Day Traders: Day traders need a trading platform that’s fast, robust, reliable and powerful. MetaTrader 5 checks all the boxes.

MetaTrader 5 offers desktop, web and mobile versions of the platform. The desktop version offers superior tools for comprehensive price analysis, algorithmic trading applications through trading robots or expert advisors (EAs) and copy trading.

The MetaTrader 5 platform uses the MQL5 language, which is an automated trading software that runs on your computer and trades for you. It can perform a variety of functions such as tracking financial symbols 24 hours a day, copy deals, create and send reports, analyze news and even provide a specific custom graphical interface.

You can robotize your successful trading strategy, as the platform provides for the entire development environment to create and optimize your own EA. Alternatively, you can choose several ready-to-use EAs, downloadable for free from Code Base, or purchase or rent from “MetaTrader Market,” the largest store of ready-to-use trading applications. You can also order custom applications from professional programmers using the freelance service.

The copy trading feature allows you to subscribe to successful trader signals, which will facilitate automatic reproduction of all trades on your account. Hundreds of free and paid signals are available for demo or live accounts.

The MetaTrader 5 platform supports the traditional netting system for exchange markets such as stock market and options market as well as the hedging option system for the forex market. It allows four execution modes: instant, request, market and exchange execution, and supports two market orders, six pending orders and two stop orders.

The platform allows you to open 100 currency or stock charts at a time, and the 21 timeframes enable comprehensive and detailed analysis of even minor price movements. It also offers 80 technical indicators and 44 analytical objects, including Gann, Fibonacci tools, geometric shapes and various channels.

MetaTrader 5 offers fundamental analysis which monitors various economic and industrial indicators. The platform carries news reports from international news agencies and also sports an economic calendar.

MetaTrader’s mobile trading platform is available for Android or iOS on your smartphone or tablet. The mobile version supports the full set of trading function, allows monitoring of account status and viewing of trading history, among other things.

The MetaTrader 5 web platform allows trading in forex and other financial instruments from any browser and operating system.

MetaTrader 5 offers financial news from international agencies and provides a daily broadcast of dozens of newsletters from global events. The platform also carries an economic calendar, which lists the time of an upcoming event, forecast values, the previous period’s values, etc.

If you’re a retail trader, you can download the MetaTrader 5 platform for free either from your broker’s website or directly from MetaQuotes’ website and practice using the platform’s demo account.

MetaTrader 5 is available for brokers in three different options: an entry license, standard license and enterprise license. Entry license provides the capacity of 1,000 real accounts, the standard license offers 25,000 default real accounts and the enterprise license offers up to 200,000 default real accounts.

The MetaTrader 5 platform can run on Windows 2008, 7, 8 or 11 and requires a processor with SSE2 support; Pentium 4/Athlon 64 or higher. The platform can also be run on Mac OS using Wine, which is a free and open source software application that allows applications designed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like OS. Here are a few more tech-necessary things to note:

• It’s recommended that you use the open source software PlayOnMac, a Wine-based free software, which provides easy installation and use of Windows applications on Mac OS.
• To run MetaTrader 5 on Unix OS, the trading platform can be installed and used on computers that run Ubuntu using Wine.
• To access the mobile platform, you can download MetaTrader 5 for Android from Google Play, connect to your broker and start trading. For iPhone/iPad, the mobile version of the platform can be downloaded on iTunes or from the AppStore.
• The application can run on iPhone 4S or a newer version, iPad 2 or a newer version and iPod Touch 5 or a newer version. iOS 8.0 or a later version of OS is required.

The MetaTrader 5 platform offers a help page dedicated to help topics such as:

• Getting started
• Trading operations
• Price charts
• Technical and fundamental analysis
• Algorithmic trading
• Trading robots
• Trading signals
• Copy trading
• Market app store
• MQL5 cloud network
• Virtual hosting for 24/7 operation
• Mobile trading
• MQL5 community

For sales inquiries, MetaQuotes can be contacted at its representative offices in Cyprus, Singapore, China, Australia, Turkey, UAE, Pakistan, Thailand, Japan and Bulgaria.

As seen already, MetaTrader 5 is an easily downloadable platform, which should not take much time. The platform provides a simple and user-friendly interface which facilitates accessing of all commands from the main menu, with the most frequently used ones available on the toolbar. Stock market quotes and the quotes of other instruments are available on the Market Watch and algorithmic trading tools and managing technical analysis can be done from the Navigator.

Opening a demo account is also fairly simple and can be done by selecting a trading server and specifying the registration data.

Since the MetaTrader 5 platform is based on distributed architecture, the platform is resistant to hacker attacks. Data exchange between the system components is routed through an encrypted connection. The accounts are protected by built-in advanced authentication and authorization systems. All system databases are securely encrypted and provided with backup and recovery options.

Although MetaTrader 5 has not gained as much popularity as the MetaTrader 4 platform, it has gained wide recognition and acceptance. One major deterrent with MetaTrader 5 is that its default setting applies the principle of FIFO (first in, first out) and thereby disallows hedging with exchange-traded assets such as stocks, options, futures, etc.

MetaTrader 5 allows hedging in currencies, as the forex market is a decentralized entity. Here are some of the differences between both platforms:

Final Thoughts

MetaQuotes has gone all out to popularize the MetaTrader 5 platform even at the cost of its predecessor, so its adoption rate is likely to grow further. MetaTrader 5 can be described as “totally hitting the mark” for advanced traders, with its feature-rich platform, an arsenal of trading tools and a wide choice of tradable asset classes. Algorithmic and copy trading are all added attractions. However, the positives could also prove to be deterrents if you really just want an uncomplicated platform.