2009 Summary

2009 is ending. This one year marks the greatest change I have seen in the world of Metatrader platform. Let's reflect on this.

Metatrader Success
MT4 is now one of the most succesful trading platform for retail forex traders. The platform is simple to use, easy to understand and with a host of EAs and indicators from the Internet. You can download the software easily and there are many brokers providing free demo accounts. Reputable brokers who did not implement metatrader had jumped in - Gain, MB Trading, FXCM and Citibank to name some. This is a Russian product and they have got it right!

NFA disruptions
Lots of new rules from US's NFA seems to target metatrader because it has become a platform that is too lax eg no more hedging with the same currency pair. But it is partially this that makes metatrader successful. Brokers have implemented different strategies to counter the change of rules: from moving to a location outside US to developing a middleware layer to mitigate the changes.

No more universal EAs
So with the NFA disruption and different mitigating strategies used, it is no longer possible to implement an EA that can be used on different brokers. One must now know the idiosyncrasies of each broker.

MQL5
MQL4 is based on functional programming. This is considered a yesterday technology. But it is simple and many can learn it quickly, including traders who have no programming background. MQL5 is object-oriented and MetaQuotes has decided to "upgrade" to this newer in the name of execution speed and of course to bring it in line with today's programming technology. Will MQL5 succeed? A lot of EAs and indicators need to be re-written. The platform has been released to the public for beta testing.

No Automated Forex Trading Chanmpionship
The yearly championship run by MetaQuotes did not occur this year. MetaQuotes explained in the early part of 2009 that they are working hard to release MQL5 and will instead have the competition in 2010 but based on MQL5 so that they can promote their new platform. The Russians had a head start in this as the Russian platform had been made available long before the English version. Well, more importantly, will MQL5 enjoy the same success as MQL4 and will MQL4 ever be replaced, even though the championship will now be focussed on using MQL5 and not MQL4?