MT4, What makes it so special?

Easy question, what is so special about it? I have used it, didnt amaze men much

Wide variaty of tools and utilities for brokers for feed manipulation, stop hunting, EA watching, requotes starting, sudden spread changing, etc. These days if broker says they offer MT4 it's pretty much good signal RUN for you. IF you can run of course.

It's well marketed - FREE to users- and .. well thats about it as far as I can tell.

"These days if broker says they offer MT4 it's pretty much good signal RUN for you."

If only it were that easy.

When we didn't offer MT4, we'd get 50 calls a day at least asking for it. It's not a pleasant platform to run (the back office setup is just terrible), but people constantly ask for it, and if you're not offering it, you're losing customers to your competitor. That's why everyone and their brother added it on.

So what is a good alternative?

The MQL4 is one of the things that make it so special, it makes it more powerful on front of other trading platforms, it allows people to program their indicators, EA’s scripts, I think that what really puts i ton front of others.

ck_itrade, I assume you are with broker, aren't you? Are you also telling us MT is not the only platform to allow broker to manipulate with different fx instruments for their benefit? I suppose so, because it's well-known that bucket shop style broker can't afford to live on the spread, therefore feed manipulation and other little games they play are essential for them to survive.

Of course they call you. How they are supposed to get rich if they bought that little EA on ebay for $39 which will make them millionaires and that EA written in MQL4?

ck_itrade is just telling it like it is. No need to shoot the messenger.
(we might get a stick and poke him a little bit, but don't hurt him, it's not his fault).
It's true everybody wants this, so they believe, in order to run automated scripts
that will make them millionaires.

It matters not whether EA's are actually profitable in the long run or not.
If this is what people ask for, someone's will offer it to them, just like 500:1 leverage.

If they were asking en mass for a particular pair that wasn't heavily traded, eventually,
a pseudo-market would get made on that pair and you'd see a bid ask on a retail platform somewhere.
The reports of, "....I lost my ass trading the Botswana peso..." or whatever would soon surface
and it's all the same because you give the people what they think they want.

Mt4 is so much like that. It's the Botswana peso (i'm making this up, I dunno what they trade there).
If you ask for it, you can have it. Ever gone to a buffet and ate until you couldn't move ?
You might lose your appetite if you saw the condition of the kitchen. Same idea.

But give 'em what they think they want. Otherwise, somebody will.

"Are you also telling us MT is not the only platform to allow broker to manipulate with different fx instruments for their benefit?"

I'm just saying that the bulk of retail clients out there ask for MT4, so everyone moved to offer it, so using that as a sign of a "bad" broker isn't going to help much, since almost every retail broker offers it. It's not exactly a chicken-and-the-egg thing, but its pretty close. Everyone has MT4 because people ask for it, and everyone asks for it because they've been exposed to it the most. That being said, if I had my choice, I wouldn't offer it, because the back office is a nightmare to setup. MT4 is one of the worst coded platforms I've ever seen. Some of its settings in Administrator are completely counter to any logic I've seen in terms of what you need to check to make it work. MetaManager makes about the same amount of sense, especially in setting up reports. The only program in the Meta family that makes some sense is MetaMultiterminal, and it has one purpose - money managers/multiple accounts. And it can't run EAs on multiple accounts, which leaves out one of the main features that people want MT4 for.

It's funny about the EAs. I answered a call today where someone tried to get me to vouch for a specific ea, and I had to do the "I can't vouch either way for any trading method" dance. It's amazing though how many EAs are out there, and how many sites are selling them.

its amazing because you can join forums and there is a ton of programming out there. ...If you have another platform that has this with this ease of use let me know. ....

MetaTrader is popular because of EA's and the availabilty of EA's. Noob traders like to idea of buying or downloading a free ea (from a message board or MT4 website), easy install, and enjoying the profits. In which ... soon after ... they realize EA trading is not "fools-proof" or the holy grail. After their equity dried up then they realize the importance of basic trading skill set.

Any broker offering MT ... run as fall away as possible. To many re-quotes and usually brokers offering the MT plateform have unpredictable spreads.

With spreads I found a situation too, though I consider MT4 a really good platform, including the MQL4, I decided to move to the Platinum platform where I have found tighter spreads and a very good charting.

I am not an experienced MT4 coder, far from it, but I do have a little coding experience... I was wondering what more experienced traders/coders think of NinjaTrader's .NET event driven platform as a viable trading/coding alternative.