Unleash your trading potential with features that make MT5 extra special

Introduction

MetaTrader 5 (MT5) stands out as a powerful, yet flexible trading platform due to the many features it offers. You may already know about the 38 built-in technical indicators, 44 graphical objects, and 21 timeframes. But there are some features that make MT5 extra special. Learning about these advanced capabilities can strengthen your trading strategies.

More Flexibility with Additional Order Types

MT5 offers several order types to give traders better control over their entry and exit strategies. These can be broadly divided into two categories – market orders (executed immediately at the current market price) and pending orders (executed when a specific price is reached).

While market orders are simpler to understand, many traders have doubts around pending orders. There are six types of pending orders. Let’s try to understand these.

Buy Limit: An order to buy at a price below the current market price. Pro traders use this for opening a position at a support level during a market correction (expect price to fall before rebounding).

Sell Limit: An order to sell at a price above the current price. It’s mainly used for opening a short position at the resistance level (expect price to rise before falling).

Buy Stop Limit: Combines the features of a buy stop and buy limit. It’s an order to buy at a limit price once the stop price is reached.

Sell Stop Limit: Combines the features of a sell stop and sell limit. It’s an order to sell at a limit price once the stop price is reached.

To place any of these orders, you need to first open a New Order. Unsure how to do this? Read about getting started with MT5 .

In the ‘Type’ option, select ‘Pending Order’. The next section will show a dropdown menu. Use this to select any of the orders explained above.

MT5 allows advanced order options. When placing very large orders, experienced traders may use Immediate-or-Cancel (IOC) or Fill-or-Kill (FOK) orders. IOC is an order to buy or sell that will be executed immediately, either in part or whole, with the unfilled part of the order being cancelled.

Fill or kill (FOK) means either the complete order quantity will be fulfilled at the specified price or the entire order will be cancelled.

Trade with More Liquidity: Know Depth of Market (DOM)

This displays the current price and order volumes (bids and asks) for a particular asset.

To open the depth of market, go to the Market Watch section and right click on the chosen asset. Then click on ‘Depth of Market’.

You can simply right click on the chart and click on the ‘Depth of Market’ option in the dropdown menu.

The best part is that you can open an order directly from the Depth of Market section.

Automate Your Trading

MT5 offers an extensive array of Expert Advisors (EAs) and access to signals from professional Signal Providers for automated trading.

To add an EA on MT5, go to the ‘Navigator’ section on the left of the chart, under ‘Market Watch’. Scroll to the folder called ‘Expert Advisors’ and double-click on it. Three folders will open – Advisors, Examples, and Free Robots. Click on ‘Advisors’ to open the list. Simply drag and drop onto the chart to use them.

Ensure to practise on a demo account before using these tools in live markets.

To subscribe to signals from professional Signal Providers, you’ll need to create an account in the MQL5 community and pay the subscription fee.

Optimise Your Trading with Back Testing 

MT5 offers a Strategy Tester tool with various options for traders to refine their strategy.

To launch the Strategy Tester, click on ‘Tester’ on the extreme right bottom of the MT5 platform. You can even go to ‘View’ in the top navigation bar and click on Strategy Tester in the dropdown menu.

This opens several options for testing and optimising. It also gives you a list of your previously performed testing and optimising tasks.

Click on the desired task to input the parameters. Then click on ‘Start’ on the extreme right bottom, to run the chosen tester.

Use the PC of Your Choice

Apart from Windows, MT5 can be made compatible with Mac and Linux operating systems, providing the greatest flexibility to those who prefer desktop or laptop trading.

For Mac, download the MT5 installer, which is usually a .dmg file. Follow the on-screen instructions to install the application and then login to with your ADSS account details. You may need to connect the correct server from the dropdown menu.

For Linux machines, you would need to download and install Wine, which is a compatibility layer. Follow the on-screen instructions to do this. Then download the .exe file and use Wine to run it. Then login with your ADSS account details.

Remember: If you’re using Mac or Linux, do check for compatibility before purchasing EAs to automate your trading.

Get Organised to Make Faster Trading Decisions

MT5 allows you to quickly find what you’re looking for by sorting and filtering instructions. For this, right click on the ‘Market Watch’ section and go to ‘Sort’.

This opens a dropdown meu with various options to sort the instruments. You can sort by Symbol, Industry, Sector, Gainers, Losers. And Deals Value.

To sort the instruments according to price, you can click on ‘Bid’ or ‘Ask’ in the Market Watch section. You can quickly add more columns to the Market Watch section. This allows you to sort the instruments based on many more parameters.

Right click in the Market Watch section, go to columns and select the parameter of your choice. For instance, clicking on ‘Volatility’ adds this parameter as a column.

Portfolio Summary & Analytics

An analysis of your past performance helps you understand the effectiveness of your trading strategies and make better decisions going ahead. You can view your portfolio summary and analyse your trading history within the platform.

Click on View in the top navigation and go to ‘Reports’. Here you can see your:

• Profit & Loss – This shows all key metrics to assess the performance and risk of your trading strategy and portfolio, including the Sharpe ratio (risk-adjusted return), profit factor (ratio of total gross profits to total gross losses), recovery factor (shows how quickly a trading strategy can recover from drawdowns), maximum drawdown (largest peak-to-trough decline), maximum deposit load (highest percentage of account funds used to open trading positions), trades per week and average hold time.
• Long & Short – Including dividends, swaps and commissions.
• Risks – Including balance and drawdown.