There are many accounts on what’s wrong with MT4 as a Trading Platform , but I want to start with the good parts first. The most obvious thing is that MT4 is the default. It’s everywhere. Learn MT4 and you will have access to the hordes of FX brokers, nearly indistinguishable from each other, and all you have to do is to choose who can offer better financial conditions. It is quite powerful; it includes many settings and indicators and can offer traders many weeks of indulging yourself with technical analysis. It doesn’t look so bad.
Antiquated Platform Or Classic Design?
However, these advantages can well turn to the negative side. Its popularity means that there is a fierce competition between traders operating within the MT4 platform, and it’s quite hard to find a new trick that hadn’t been already used somewhere — and the essence of successful trading is constant innovation. With great power comes great complexity — new traders can easily be overwhelmed by amounts of indicators and settings offered, and many of them are still there only because they were fashionable some years ago, even though they were not proved to be useful in any way. And while it still maintains a decent look, it is a regular old Windows application.
Nowadays, we live in a much more technologically diverse environment than we had 10 years ago, while the world still enjoyed (or perhaps suffered) the Windows near-monopoly. There are Macs, there are tablets, there are iPhones etc. etc., and traders want to be able to work from anywhere. The only common piece of software available on these numerous platforms is the Web browser. 10 years ago, the browsers were clumsy and slow. Now, modern browsers can do anything that desktop applications are able to do — there are 3D games, video editors, software IDEs and, of course, trading clients working entirely from the browser (like my own EntryForex platform). This is the future, and it looks like MT4 doesn’t have a place in it anymore.
