Why You Should Move Away From Metatrader 4

For the last two years, most of my efforts have been alocated at the finding of new and profitable automated trading systems for the metatrader 4 platform. After trading mt4 and several metatrader brokers for the past two years I have to say that serious traders should be moving on from the metatrader platform and it's brokers.

Don't get me wrong, the metatrader platform, along with all of it's programming glitches and limitations, is one of the most versatile trading platforms I have used during the past few years. My problem is not so much with the platform itself but with what using the platform implies. 

As you may know, metatrader brokers have to have a dealing desk because this is a requirement of the metatrader platform. Moreover, having a dealing desk implies that there can be significant broker manipulation of your price feed and that there can be very bad things happening with your order executions. There are a lot of horror stories out there about metatrader brokers failing to execute market orders, filling orders at ghost ticks, etc.

In my experience, dealing with a metatrader broker is most of the time dealing with a bucket shop and what a bucket shop would definitely hate, is you making money. So long story short, making money on metatrader brokers is pretty hard with anything but long term strategies because on the short timeframes they have an arsenal (bordering legality)  which they can use in  order to make your trades go wrong, even if your system is indeed a profitable one. 

The alternative we have is to simply move away from metatrader when handling large amounts of money. We can of course go to ECN brokers that use Trade Station and code our automated trading systems using the Easy Language, something which would be far better than using the metatrader broker's likely manipulated data feeds. However, fxdd has recently launched a metatrader xtreme platform which seems to be an ECN adaptation of the mt4 platform. I may try it during the following months and see how it works ! Despite all of this, the regular metatrader platform is still a very easy and convenient way to use and test automated trading strategies using small accounts.

If you would like to learn more about free and commercial automated trading systems to run on your mt4 platform please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !