How is cTrader different from MT4?

cTrader platform is believed to be one of the most innovative, sophisticated and revolutionary trading platform available on the market.
Designed by traders, for traders, the cTrader platform offers a user friendly interface that is highly customizable with different pre-sets and detachable charts so that it can suit the needs of any trader. Enhanced charting abilities and order management systems allow for more efficient management of your positions in fast moving markets.

cTraders sleek and easy to use interface allows traders of any level to take advantage of the many benefits and features the platform has to offer.

1. Level II pricing
2. Detachable charts
3. Automated trading through a dedicated platform
4. Next generation user interface and charting techniques
5. Extensive back testing facilities

cTrader WebTrader

cTrader Web is a lightning-fast responsive web interface enabling you access to your cTrader account from any web-browser.
A key feature of cTrader Web is the emphasis placed on making cTrader Web as close to the cTrader platform as possible. This means you will have access to most features of the cTrader platform at your finger tips when using cTrader Web.

cTrader Mobile

Accessible from any iOS or Android device, cTrader Mobile application enables exceptionally responsive trading conditions straight from your mobile phone.
Emphasising trading "on-the-go", cTrader Mobile provides an interface that can be used to execute orders, close orders, modify orders, and manage accounts.

cTrader cAlgo

A key component of the cTrader suite, cAlgo is designed to be an extremely powerful platform for creating and trading with robots and indicators developed in C#. With intuitive built in back-testing functionality, users can choose from a wide range of C# resources to help them write their own algorithms.
With intuitive built in back-testing functionality, users can choose from a wide range of C# resources to help them write their own algorithms.

cTrader Trading

cTrader offers advanced trading capabilities with fast entry and execution, asynchronous order processing, level two pricing, a full range of advanced order types, an abundance of information to support risk management and help investors to make smarter trading choices.

Fast Entry and Execution

Traders grade your service based execution quality and speed. Your success will depend on how fast you can fill orders, with cTrader orders are filled in just milliseconds. cTrader supports simultaneous order processing, multiple orders can be filled at once, there’s no order queue.

Level II Pricing

cTrader’s depth of market shows the full range of executable prices coming directly from liquidity providers. Orders are filled against the full order book using Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP).

Advanced Order Protection

Choice of Trigger Methods

Pending Orders, Stop Loss and Take Profits can be triggered by the opposite side, second consecutive price and even second consecutive opposite price to protect against harmful erroneous prices.

Advanced Order Protection

Advanced Take Profit can be used to scale out of a position at multiple levels, Stop Loss can be set to break-even and Server Trailing Stops can be used to follow profitable positions.

Stop Out Type

cTrader offers two stop out types. Smart Stop Out gives the best chance of recovery in the unfortunate event that margin falls below stopout level. The largest margin taking position will be partially closed to maintain the position and the entry point. This algorithm protects margin, positions and balance. Fair Stop Out closes the largest margin taking position entirely as opposed to the most unprofitable position. This method frees as much margin as possible to protect the remaining positions.

Quick Trade

Quick Trade can be used to open, close and modify orders using either one or two clicks from every section of the platform allowing traders to respond quickly to fast moving markets.

Volume Tooltips

When selecting the volume of an order it’s important to know the Pip value, commission cost and margin required without the fuss of working it out, especially when a portfolio includes multiple asset-classes with varying conditions. Volume tooltips keep traders informed.

Symbol Info

Information about symbols is critical, especially for stocks where variables can differ wildly by exchange. cTrader ensures traders are explicitly informed via symbol i-Windows which promote all properties including trading hours, Lot size, base and quote asset, commissions, swaps, etc.

Market Snapshot

Deal tickets include a snapshot of the order book to help traders understand the price their order was filled at. Furthermore every Deal, Order or Position ticket contains up to 50 fields of information and a detailed timeline of events to ensure traders stay informed at every step.

Watchlists

Unlimited watchlists can be created to save and categorise favorite symbols and keep the in the cloud to access from anywhere. Watchlists can be can be detached and moved around the workspace to monitor prices and trade when opportunity strikes

Market Sentiment

A live market sentiment indicator displays the ratio of long versus short positions of all other trades using cTrader across all supported brokers. This tool is perfect to help with making a decision to enter or exit the market, or not.

Email Alerts

Traders can configure a range of email alerts to get notified about important events in their account. Available alerts include Pending Orders, Stop Loss and Take Profits being triggered, deposits and withdrawals, Stop Out and up to three custom margin call alerts at different levels.

MetaTrader vs cTrader

cTrader developed by Spotware came onto the trading scene only in 2011. Within 5 years this ‘MetaTrader killer’ has taken a significant chunk out of the retail trading market to the extent that several brokers now offer both cTrader and MetaTrader to clients.
Understandably, cTrader has tried to improve upon MetaTrader’s faults given its late release date by comparison. The platform looks and feels sleeker, and is noticeably more modern in terms of both aesthetic looks and functionality. cTrader also sports more order types and a sleeker and more intuitive platform navigation.
The interface is clean and there is not a great deal of noticeable difference between cTrader and other retail platforms including MetaTrader. This is especially the case for beginners. The same features such as charts, trade logging, account management tools, back testing and technical indicators are all available.

c Trader Indicators

cTrader has a full set of technical analysis indicators and studies. You can also use custom indicators in cTrader, which you can download from cTDN.com.

You can download custom indicators by going to cTDN.com/algos/indicators.
cTDN is a dedicated community for cTrader users to share and collaborate on trading robots and indicators.
To add a downloaded indicator to your cTrader platform

1. Download or move the indicator to My Documents > cAlgo > Sources > Indicators.
2. Open the cAlgo platform. If you don't already have it, you can download cAlgo from your broker's website (or download here if you're just using the demo fromSpotware.com).
3. Click on the Indicators tab from the Robots/Indicators menu on the left.
4. Find the Indicator you want to use.
5. Click the Build icon http://ctdn.com/bundles/ctraderctdn/...icon_cuted.png. If the build is successful, the icon appearance will change to http://ctdn.com/bundles/ctraderctdn/img/build_icon.png.

The Indicator will now be available in your cTrader platform under the Custom category.

I use Windows not because I like it, but because many people are using it. Huge communities and support to MT4 is the main reason for its popularity..... Except Ninjatrader and Tradestation, others communities (Elitetrader.com or futures.io for example) are very weak and almost dead.

Both trading platforms certainly have their own strengths. MT4 is popular for its simplicity, flexibility, inbuilt tools and Expert Advisors. However, the strength of cTrader lies in its excellent user interface, sophisticated functionalities like market depth and multiple indicators and timeframes it offers. cTrader is easy to adopt for beginners and a user who has become accustomed to the user-friendly cTrader interface might not be willing to switch platforms at a later date, unless they require additional functionality that cTrader is unable to provide. Hence in terms of overall user experience, cTrader provides fierce competition for the market leader, MT4.

MT4 Vs cTrader

How do the two platforms compare on some of the key criteria for evaluating a trading platform?

1. User Interface: cTrader is known for its smooth, uncluttered and intuitive interface. Though the popularity of MT4 is certainly unmatchable, when it comes to the user interface and ease of use, the cTrader platform would potentially come out on top. This will, of course, however, depend on the trader. Novice traders are likely to prefer the ease of use that comes with cTrader.
2. Support for Auto-Trading Functionalities: MT4 offers Expert Advisors for auto-trading, which are easy to use, customisable and work well for both new traders and experts. cAlgo is cTrader’s equivalent and is programmable in C#. MT4 is still, however, widely considered to have the best in class support functionalities for its auto-trading tools. Also as MT4 has such a vast online community, it’s easier for the user to find support on internet for this platform, whereas support for cTrader’s auto-trading may be limited.
3. Market Depth Functionality: Understanding market depth is important for the trader as it enables them to access liquidity and enter trades at precise price points. cTrader offers three alternatives for market depth assessment which are standard depth, price depth, and VWAP depth. However, MT4 offers only one market depth feature. When it comes to giving the trader a comprehensive picture of market depth, cTrader scores above MT4.
4. Flexibility and Customisation: The flexibility for customisation of indicators based on the personal preferences of traders is lower in cTrader. This platform does not allow users to customise indicators and programs, however MT4 has many tools that allow the platform to be fully customised, with or without the need to know the programming language.

Features of cTrader

1. Charts – cTrader offers three chart modes – single-chart, multi-chart and free-chart which can be used to get different visualisations of market trends, based on user preferences.
2. Market depth functionalities – cTrader provides a comprehensive assessment of market depth with three distinct views– Standard depth, Price depth, and VWAP depth. These features help the trader in closely tracking market liquidity for different price points, thereby helping them make more precise entries.
3. cAlgo (cBots) – In line with MT4’s Expert Advisors, cTrader offers its algorithmic trading tool called cAlgo, which allows the trader to program robots for trade execution, creation of customer indicators, performing strategies and back testing. The tool works on C# language and .NET framework.
4. Indicators and Timeframes – The platform offers a large array of indicators such as Moving averages, MACD, Bollinger etc. for analysis of market data. cTrader offers many timeframe options including the usual 1 / 5 / 15 minutes and more.

For more details watch video on Youtube

“cTrader was designed to deliver fast execution”

cTrader is a state-of-art trading platform. You cannot ignore the charting feature if you are a trader and use technical analysis for your trades. The cTrader can be described as a higher-end, luxurious Lexus compared to MT4. Trading execution is as fast as MT4. I like the fact that cTrader can be Ticket based or a position based platform.
The cTrader employs the Direct Market Access (DMA) that enables the trader to submit buy or sell orders to the exchange without going through an intermediary. It is obvious that the cTrader trading platform is more advanced in view of the Level 2 market depth it offers compared to MT4 which does not have this feature at all.
As mentioned, cTrader was designed to deliver fast execution and a professional charting experience. The visual interface of the software is eye catching and neat. Well, to be honest, if you are a trader and you have to stare at your screen for long hours you rather do it with software that is appealing to the eye.
Comparatively, there are not many plugins and programs that have been developed for this platform, but you can still employ a programmer who is familiar with C# (C Sharp) to create a custom cbot to cTrader. The cTrader is accessible in a web browser, which makes it convenient for traders who are on the move to access their account anywhere in the world. The cTrader has introduced cMirror as an added feature. The cMirror allows mirror trading which continues to gain popularity within the investment and trading community.
One of the disadvantages I noted about cTrader is that “Stop Orders” can’t be placed as easy as when performed on the MT4 platform.

How Is cTrader Different From Regular Market Maker Platforms?

cTrader was designed and developed as a fully ECN model that offers direct market access (DMA) to traders without any external bridge. The traditional MetaTrader terminal is a market maker model that requires ECN or STP bridges to connect traders directly to the interbank exchanges or liquidity providers. The cTrader, on the other hand, is one of the very first trading platforms that were designed to connect traders directly to a liquidity provider, which primarily provides ECN and STP trading conditions to traders from the outset. cTrader Forex brokers eliminate the need for any dealing desk, which prevents any conflicts of interest between the broker and its traders. Since the orders are passed directly to the market, brokers don’t have any role in filling any positions, which ultimately help traders to enjoy complete peace of mind by being confident that their brokers won’t act against their clients’ interests.
Most cTrader Forex brokers pass on the interbank rates to their traders at markup spreads, and usually charge a commission per trade. cTrader allows traders to trade directly from the charts, and all positions can be modified or closed within the charts. cTrader offers the Depth Of Market (DOM) feature, which provides live updates on all orders that are currently passed on to the liquidity provider. The DOM feature offers different levels of market depth and is considered as an important tool to understand the market dynamics, which helps traders to make informed trading decisions based on the liquidity of the markets.
Direct market access also allows the cTrader platform to offer accurate live price feeds along with super tight spreads and instant order execution. Since orders are passed directly to the market, there can be significant slippages during volatile market conditions. However, all orders are executed at market rates, and there will be no instances of requotes or refills while trading on the cTrader platform. During times of low volatility, traders might experience problems with liquidity, which might lead to orders being filled partially; therefore, cTrader ECN accounts are free from dealing desk situations where the order is either filled completely or rejected altogether. cTrader offers automated trading options through its cAlgo platform, which uses the C# programming language for creating automated trading systems. cAlgo is an advanced automated trading platform that is suited for traders with high levels of experience and knowledge in programming, which is quite a disadvantage for regular traders. Regular traders may hire programmers or make use of the cTrader community to seek programming help from the forum, but overall, the programming nature of the automated trading system is considered to be highly sophisticated than other established trading platforms in the market.

- Is it free?
- What possiblilities of testing
- How complex is the coding? Like MT4 or prorealtime?

Advantages of scalping on cTrader

There are some situations when it may be necessary to start to take profits at predefined profit areas. Assume you have a long trade which was set up based on pivot points at the S2 level, you would naturally take profits at S1. But supposing there is a strong fundamental influence on the market which can possibly take the market to the central pivot and the R1 areas before exhaustion. The Advanced Take Profit function of ctrader allows your trade to achieve these extra profit targets as well automatically. You can scale out of a profitable position by using up to 4 different take profit levels per position.
With MT4 there is no automatic scaling out. You have to do this manually, which means you must be on your charts for hours on end, monitoring the trade. This is quite a tiring process and we all know that fatigue is the perfect trigger for errors of judgement, which inadvertently lead to losses.
Also, in ctrader , the trader can tell the platform to start to trail the market when a particular number of pips in unrealized profits have been made, and then tell the platform at what distance from the market price the trailing stop should be set to. In Mt4, the trader has to wait until the trade has moved to a profit level that the trader is comfortable with, and then set the Trailing stop by a particular amount of pips. In essence, the trader can only set the Trailing Stop when the trade is active, and this has to be done manually. Only one type of trailing stops can be used, which disallows the use of individual strategies.
Finally, some traders use the Break Even strategy. In this strategy, the trader uses a two-tier exist system of trading in which half of a position can be closed when a certain profit level has been attained. The rest of the position is allowed to run while the stop loss is moved to the entry price for the trade, which is the breakeven point. ctrader allows you to set these parameters before the trade is executed. The price automatically adjusts for broker commissions, and trigger points can be set in pips. Mt4 has no breakeven functionality built in.
There are many many others advantages ctrader has over mt4 but I don't want my response to get too long to read. It is quite long as it is. ctrader works the best for me.

MT4 is lacking compared to cTrader.
Not that many broker offer cTrader as of yet but most broker offer MT4.
MT4 has more indicator, EA and script compared to cTrader.
cTrader is marketed as purely ECN oriented trading platform.
Download both and try which one suit you the best.

Ctrader is awesome, clearly some smart developers. Perhaps they could figure out a way to bridge to an mt4 feed and offer the platform to individuals, like ninjatrader...

cTrader could be fantastic, but there are so many what-the-heck interface and functionality features. It wasn't designed by active traders who designed it while trading. You can just tell by using it. I wont comment on the ECN backend, algo tools etc. But as a sit down and get trading interface for experienced traders, it is not close to NT8.

And the DOM for FX is highly overrated. Might I suggest you compare cTrader DOM's for EURUSD between numerous ECM demo accounts... They are almost identical. And the b/o order volume and distribution doesn't change regardless of session.

For clean smooth usability and interface, Trading View is much better than cTrader

cTrader 3.3 is a significant improvement to v3.0 and especially compared to MT4/5 for plug and play chart trading diversity. But only a baby compared to NT8.

If v4.0 cTrader encroaches on NT8 hands-on day trading trading functionality, then we have something. Until then, cTrader is what you use because NT8 is expensive and their FX brokers are so few (depending on country of residence?) And because MT4/5 is.... what you use because so did everyone else and thats where it all started, not because it is nice to use. Like Netscape Navigator that didn't die.

Dukascopy jForex is possibly better than cTrader. But I has ethical problems with that particular Swiss house.

Been using CTrader for some time, it really has a long way to go yet, really needs some work. Hasn't got good old 'mechanical' positive feel of MT4 when you click anything.

Also unfortunately support is incredibly bad, it has taken 3,4, 5 years to simply add some basic features, and display options really need some work, I simply cannot get my charts to look and operate the way I prefer. Your broker account details are also shared via 'cloud' so if you use any other CDTN features your information is shared also.

As far as I can tell your own platform links directly to a cloud service of some type, to achieve faster execution, like all bucket shops your order is most likely dealt with at a later date, I don't know what information is being shared via this, but chart loading data sometimes seems very restricted by this feature.

If you use indicators there are a select 'common eye candy loser type' indicators available from their own source, very few coders offering reasonable services to code anything up, the ones that do hold a small monopoly, so are over priced, gladly I have my own add-ons.

Another annoying association of this platform is virtually no third party operations, meaning if you have any questions or need coding you can only go to CTDN or their affiliates.

If you use two different PC's they have attempted a half ass'd common sharing process which can cause many problems, instead of having two totally independent platforms on two different machines sharing the one account.

That's off my chest and my gripe.

I think it has great potential with significant version dev. But right now, the population of good brokers using it is disproportionately large relative to the adequacy of the platform. Meaning, cTrader will have to grow into the position it has made for itself. But it has all the potential to destroy MT as a modern trading platform, particularly with native tick, range and renko. Though renko is limited to plain vanilla.

One thing cTrader is probably worst in class: drawing and managing lines on chart. It is not good for classic trend line charting.

Many traders are used to mt4 platform, but as we all known, this is no longer developed further and brokers will be slowly implement mt5 in offers.

MT5 has some good new features but some elements are worst than in MT4. I'm hearing some bad opinions from traders about ergonomics of MT5.



How do you think? Is is better to learning MT5 platform or more perspective is cTrader?
Metaquotes has implemented C# language for developers. Will it affect for the amount of developing software for MT5?

I did my first EA project in MT4 back in 2007 and I have a lot of EA, script and indicator code in MQL. However just the fact that MT5 totally neglected to include native tick, range and Renko charts is, in my opinion, a huge minus and proves that they are not designing the system for serious traders, but just for the brokers! (this is my opinion and you're free to disagree...). To my experience, one of the big issues with automated system development is the false signals time based charts produce when market is not moving, and also the lack of clear movement in lower time frames compared for example to tick charts, which I prefer to trade intraday entry/exit points. Yes one can produce tick charts on MT with the offline charting function, but this is highly unstable and cumbersome.

Also MQL is very cumbersome and dysfunctional language... I am not a programmer, but I am self-taught to program some MQL.
At this point, my patience is up with Metatrader (MT5 I have no interest nor intention to ever even touch). I'
m ready to do the jump from MT4 to cTrader or NT and prepared to lose a lot of code and go through the pain or learning C# (which is a real hurdle to some-one like me, who has very little aptitude and talent for programming).

To me it is clear as day that the era of Metatrader is over and it is time for a new market leader! MT has been a great system for beginners and a good place for people to learn and develop indicators and trading systems... like Netscape browser was one day a great tool and Yahoo was The Search Engine... LOL

Quantower platform did connection to cTrader API. It's great!!!
https://www.quantower.com/

I'm a C# programmer myself. Exposing the greatness of forex trading to C# is just awesome, this is the MT killer definitely. I was having trouble last time with cTrader where they don't have any visual backtesting. But now, they do have. As a programmer, talk about the asynchronous process, cTrader does a lot better compared to MT which can only execute one order at a time. Especially when you are playing with Grid.

MT is using C++ which is quite an old programming language. You can play with grid, heavy calculation, but it has its limit. In the end, you'll burn yourself out. I'm facing this myself and it's just stupid that MetaQuotes still keeping C++ as their base language in this modern-moving-fast world. You've got C#, even now node.js, JSON is the new practice and a lot of Javascript library and languages around where it offers quick and fast programming. MetaQuotes just comfortable with C++...

Imagine with that speed, sorting an array of objects with string and dates, will be more than a week job! You need to build a sorter class, the object model, then dealing with instance and clearing the memory and have to deal with specific from many types of string, it's just wasting time! While in other modern languages, can be done in less than 4 hours only.

Unfortunately, not many people get to use this. I guess because most of the broker/trader are more focused on manual trading, not automated like myself.

Hi everyone, is it safe to grant unlimited access rights to custom indicators? The cTrader platform says "do not grant unlimited access rights to the algorithms from untrusted publishers", but how do I get to know all the people who offer their indicators for free? According to this principle, I should not grant access rights to anyone.
I downloaded this indicator from ctrader.guru