Finally it happened - the forex market was awaiting for the first major broker to go live with MT5 - and today Alpari made the official announcement. Several small brokers are already offering MT5 however everyone in the market were waiting for Alpari to start offering it. Alpari is considered the leading Metatrader broker in the market and is a barometer of MT5 attractiveness. The other issue that was preventing MT5 from becoming widely adopted by brokers is that there was not enough demand from traders thus creating a chicken and the egg sittuation - on one hand no one is offering it because traders are not familiar with it yet and on the other traders are not demanding it because nobody is offering it yet..
With Alpari now offering it live this situation is expected to change and we will surely see a surge in the number of brokers offering MT5 live to their clients.
I've had the pleasure of discussing Metatrader 5 with Andrey Vedikhin, Alpari Group co-founder and the CEO of Alpari UK:
MetaTrader 5 is so much more than an upgrade of MetaTrader 4 – it is a revolution in the world of Forex, precious metals and CFD trading. In order to take full advantage of this powerful trading device, we at Alpari believe that traders will need an experienced, technology-driven broker by their side that has the scope and commitment to empower its clients in this new world of trading.
Institutional level of trading experience
MT5 will allow retail clients to experience all the benefits of trading on institutional platforms. What that means is that traders will receive a vast amount of information on real-time market Liquidity through Depth of the Market. Clients will be able to analyse order volumes and base their decisions on the liquidity they see in the market.
In addition to this, new order types (Stop Limits) and order execution strategies (“Fill Or Kill” and “Immediate Or Cancel”) will allow traders to use advanced trading strategies and tools which were previously available only on institutional platforms.
Next-generation of automated trading strategies
One of the main reasons why MetaTrader 4 has become one of the most popular Forex trading platforms in the world is its Expert Advisor (EA) functionality. Alpari is an EA-friendly broker and more than 80% of our clients use EAs. With MT5 EA programmers will get access to the most advanced and powerful language MQL5 - a revolution in the history of online trading. The release of MQL5 widens the gap between this technology and that offered by the competitors, making it almost impossible for others to repeat success of MT5 in the nearest future.
The move from MQL4 to MQL5 can only be described as being as significant in online trading as was the step from C to C++ in the programming world.
There isn’t a thing with regard to EA trading that can’t be realised with MQL5. If you’re programming your own EAs, you’ll literally find no limits but your own. You can even build “intelligence” into your EAs and use graphical objects that interact with each other – it’s actually all very similar to C++.
While backtesting is of paramount importance to EA traders there has never been a quick and easy way of doing this. It’s such a complex task, requiring many tests on multiple scenarios with a large amount of historical data. The new MT5 Strategy Tester now cuts the time it takes to backtest an EA from several hours or even days to minutes. It allows traders to test their strategies not just on their own computer but on a cluster of thousands computers based all over the world. The complex task of testing and optimising EAs is broken down into digestible chunks which the computers in the cluster can complete in minutes, saving the programmer valuable time and making the process highly efficient.
MT5 Community
Success of MT4 is partly due to the fact that MetaQuotes Software Corporation has created a large community of MT4 users. We estimate that millions of people are already using MetaTrader 4 as their main Trading Platform . With that in mind, MT5 has brought a lot of new tools and services to grow this community to tens of millions users in the next few years. We know from a reputable source that more exciting things will be available for MT5 traders very soon.
MT5 enables global high-tech brokers to streamline their processes
As a large global business Alpari has the technology in place to take full advantage of the unique MT5 Gateway API and connect MT5 platform to our liquidity pool and matching engine in a more efficient way. It results in excellent liquidity as well as better execution and better prices for our clients.
MT5 is a long-awaited scalable solution for big companies like Alpari as our client base of more than 170,000 active clients has overgrown the limits of MT4 platform long time ago.
Despite all the advantages of MT5, Alpari will continue to provide and expand its online trading services on MT4, alongside our MT5 offering.
