MT4 in 2026: why it refuses to die
MetaQuotes stopped issuing new MT4 licences years ago, nudging brokers toward MT5. But most retail forex traders kept using MT4. The reason is not complicated: MT4 has twenty years of muscle memory behind it. More than a decade's worth of custom indicators, Expert Advisors, and community scripts run on MT4. Moving to MT5 means porting that entire library, and few people would rather keep trading than recoding.
I spent time testing both platforms side by side, and the differences are less dramatic than the marketing suggests. MT5 has a few extras like more timeframes and a built-in economic calendar, but the charting feels very similar. Unless you need MT5-specific features, there's no compelling find more reason to switch.
MT4 setup: what the manual doesn't tell you
Downloading and installing MT4 is the easy part. Where people waste time is configuration. Out of the box, MT4 loads with four charts tiled across one window. Close all of them and open just the instruments you care about.
Templates are worth setting up early. Configure your preferred indicators on one chart, then save it as a template. After that you can load it onto other charts in two clicks. Minor detail, but over time it saves hours.
One setting worth changing: go to Tools > Options > Charts and check "Show ask line." The default view is the bid price by default, which can make your entries look off by the spread amount.
MT4 strategy tester: honest expectations
MT4's built-in strategy tester allows you to run Expert Advisors against historical data. That said: the quality of those results depends entirely on your tick data. Built-in history data is interpolated, meaning gaps between real data points are estimated mathematically. For anything more precise than a quick look, download proper historical data.
That quality percentage in the results is more important than the bottom-line PnL. If it's under 90% means the results are probably misleading. People occasionally share screenshots with 25% modelling quality and ask why their live results don't match.
The strategy tester is one of MT4's stronger features, but only if you feed it decent data.
Building your own MT4 indicators
MT4 ships with 30 standard technical indicators. Most traders never touch them all. However the real depth lives in user-built indicators written in MQL4. The MQL5 marketplace alone has over 2,000 options, spanning simple moving average variations to elaborate signal panels.
Installing them is straightforward: place the .ex4 or .mq4 file into the MQL4/Indicators folder, restart MT4, and it appears in the Navigator panel. The catch is quality. Community indicators vary wildly. Some are genuinely useful. Many stopped working years ago and will crash your terminal.
If you're downloading custom indicators, verify when it was last updated and if users have flagged problems. A poorly written indicator doesn't only show wrong data — it can slow down your entire platform.
The MT4 risk controls you're probably not using
MT4 has several built-in risk management tools that the majority of users never configure. The most useful is the maximum deviation setting in the new order panel. This defines how much slippage you're willing to tolerate on market orders. Without this configured and you'll get whatever price comes through.
Everyone knows about stop losses, but trailing stops are underused. Right-click an open trade, pick Trailing Stop, and enter your preferred distance. The stop follows with price moves in your favour. Not perfect for every strategy, but for trend-following it reduces the temptation to micromanage the trade.
These settings take a minute to configure and they remove a lot of the emotional decision-making.
Expert Advisors — before you trust a robot with your money
EAs sounds appealing: set rules, let the code trade, walk away. The reality is, a huge percentage of them lose money over any extended time period. The ones sold with perfect backtest curves are usually curve-fitted — they performed well on historical data and stop working once the market does something different.
This isn't to say all EAs are worthless. A few people code their own EAs to handle specific, narrow tasks: entering at a specific time, automating position size calculations, or closing trades at fixed levels. These smaller, focused scripts are more reliable because they execute repetitive actions that don't require interpretation.
Before running any EA with real money, test on demo first for a minimum of a few months. Forward testing tells you more than historical results ever will.
MT4 on Mac and mobile: what actually works
MT4 was built for Windows. If you're on macOS has always been compromises. Previously was emulation, which was functional but introduced visual bugs and stability problems. Some brokers now offer Mac-specific builds built on compatibility layers, which are better but still aren't built from scratch for Mac.
The mobile apps, on both Apple and Android devices, work well for watching your account and tweaking stops. Doing proper analysis on a phone screen doesn't really work, but managing exits from your phone is worth having.
Check whether your broker offers a native Mac build or just a wrapper — the difference in stability is noticeable.