Mt4 to mt5
The world of Forex trading relies a lot on the expert advisor software solutions which are based on the MetaTrader platform from MetaQuotes Software firm. A lot of the robots and expert advisors are based on the language MQL4, which is written specifically to help the traders in making their forex transactions.
However, in the fall of 2010, the company plans to release the new version MT5, which is a complete re-architecture of the MT4 platform and hence it leads to the question of whether the brokers should move from MT4 to MT5 and following are the main points to consider.
The MT5 has various benefits over its predecessor in the sense that the MT5 provides a lot of extra graphs and analytical tools which aid the traders to interpret data better. Moreover, the MT5 also provides additional avenues of trades in terms of both financial instruments and trade methodologies. Other than this, the MT5 is built on the new language MQL5, which has its own set of dynamic test harness and thus testing the new software and debugging them can be done in a much better way.
Apart from the above benefits, the MQL5 also brings more features and classes to the platform and this result in a much better and simpler integration of the C++ codes into the new system. The new platform is more optimized and hence the expert advisors written in MT5 are expected to run much faster and hence give better results.
While the above pros show that an MT4 to MT5 transition should be made, there are also some cons which need to be taken into consideration. The new MT5 does not allow various operations like hedging and multi hedging which are features that a lot of traders are interested in. Apart from this, the MT4 to MT5 conversion is not directly possible since the MT5 code is not backward compatible and hence the transition is not going to be smooth. And last but not the least, since the MT5 is still in beta and hence not considered stable, a lot of people are still sticking to MT4 expert advisors only.
All in all, while the long term solution would need the traders to move from MT4 to MT5 platform, till proper software which converts MT4 expert advisors and other customizations to MT5 does not exist, and the MT5 is not proven to be completely stable, the conversion is not going to be smooth.
