MT4 is a standard in the industry and many retail forex traders are used to it regardless of their broker of choice. If it has become a standard something good it must have. I would say, basically it is the ease of use.
I, however cant see MT4 with the same eyes. Being a programmer myself I can say I am not entirely happy with MT4
1- The platform is buggy. Since like lost data occur. for example there are huge gaps of data loss in the charts in 2011. Go ahead and download MT4, install it and check it out yourself. You can in theory remedy that by doownloading the data from MetaQuotes Corp. Well, please do it and verify it doesnt solve anything. You end up with the same incomplete charts.
2- The performance suffers a hugh impact when you download historical data for several currencies. From them on, your MT4 will consume 300MB+ of RAM in your computer and causing constant freezes. Many traders havent probably run into this. If your not a developer who needs to backtests his strategiues you probably havent had to download years of past data.
3- The developing experience is just horrible. Very hard to program your strategies. Although the documentation is decent, the IDE to develop is just years behind in respect with current development environments.
4- MT4 allows itself to be tricked, featured exploited by unscrupulous forex brokers. Boston Technologies a company closely related to MetaQuotes, created the Virtual Dealer plugin. This software allows brokers to easily steal from clients using practices like slippage in execution (always in favor of the broker) you most of the time get a worse fill than the current markets. It might be by 0.1 pip. which for the broker accounst for millions in profit over time when you add thousands of transactions from many clients.
Want to know more about this abusive and popular plugin used by forex brokers?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie9gbZjMqxs
And now the evidence of supposedly respectable Forex Brokers that have been caught cheating by using and exploting MT4 features. In this case Forex.com and the regulatory actions taken by The National Futures Association against them for ilegal practices with Metatrader:
http://www.megadroidresults.com/2010/07/15/forex-com-gain-capital-mt4-virtual-dealer-plugin/
http://www.nfa.futures.org/basicnet/Case.aspx?entityid=0339826&case=10BCC00015&contrib=NFA
You could argue that Metarader is a good software and it is the brokers who are evil and take advantage. I say, if it were really solid as a software nobody would be allow to trick orders' execution.
A software like Metatrader 4, that can be tricked and whose behaviour can be altered using external add ons, is just not to be trusted.
This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC
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