Thank you everyone for the thoughtful responses so far. It seems according to most posters, the top reason people like using it is because it so widely used, which makes sense. Most forex brokers offer it in some form or another, and it's highly customizable (thanks for the examples Hanover). I guess I just wish it worked out of the box a little better. It comes pretty barebones and seems that you really have to know where to look to find or get someone to program an EA to do what you want if you are not experienced in programming languages. I suppose it is like building a PC versus buying one off the shelf. If you know how to build one you can make it do what you want, but for those who do not know how to build, they just want to buy one with features already installed. In other words, personally, I guess I just prefer something that works more out of the box rather than having to hunt down tools to make it work for me. Obviously certain platforms are broker specific, such as Thinkorswim, but I think MT4 can just be a bit too overwhelming and not very easy to use overall in my opinion. Personally, I don't like the way it even looks. I know it sounds trivial, but the charts are very ugly to me and scrolling and zooming is not very smooth or easy to do like it is in TOS. Also, the drawing tools are clunky and don't draw very smoothly either. I really don't like the way you cannot draw a horizontal line without having both rays extended, or the fact that there is no way (at least not out of the box) to have multiple windows detached in each monitor if you use multiple monitors while trading. I may give it a try again if I have to switch brokers, but overall, at least for now, I just don't think it is for me.