It’s easy to see why Metatrader has basically conquered the market. As a desktop platform, it seems there’s simply no competition out there. It’s versatile and easy to use. And you scale up as you advance. Beginners don’t need to program expert advisers, and experts can go days on end without peeping at what the platform’s doing for them. You simply download the program either from your broker’s website or from Metaquotes, and enter your account information. I suggest – if you haven’t already done it – you open a demo account before starting this lesson. Otherwise you’ll be reading but not learning.

As you can see, the screen is divided into 4. Your navigator, market watch, your terminal and the charts window. You can open here as many charts as you like, and one thing I like about MT5 is that you can undock them and move charts to a second monitor.

Let’s start with the navigator. Here you’ve got your open accounts – yes you can have several, indicators and scripts and EAs, which are automated programs. We won’t go into that too much here, except to say you can also access all of them from up here on the menu. The assets button lets you show all the assets, hide them all and search for them by clicking on the plus. You can also list them by asset class using the symbols selection. Find what you want and double click to add it to the watch. Right click on an asset to open a chart, a tick chart or depth of market – that’s how many bids and offers there are at any market rate. Or its properties: When its market is tradeable, its lot and tick size, and so forth.

The Terminal show us our current status – open trades and pending, our past trades, trading bots we can acquire, our personal mailbox in the MQL community, news and the new addition – an economic calendar. There’s more, but I don’t want to bore you with lists. Just remember that journal refers to activities on the platform – not your trading. You’ll have to maintain that independently with the aid of the history tab.

Finally, there’s the chart window. Like I said – one or as many as you can concentrate on. You can stack them or shift through the tabs. Enlarge, horizontally, add all kinds of charting shapes and tools, Fibonacci, change between candle, line or bars, and, of course, add as many technical indicators as your heart desires, through the insert menu. To get rid of one, open the list, click and delete.

To open a trade, either right click the chart, the asset or click new order. When you do, this window opens up, where you make sure you’re on the right asset, or change it. Switch between market and pending execution. In the latter case, choose your opening order and set its opening price. You’ll also need to determine the size of your trade in lots, and add the stop loss and take profit orders to close the trade. With pending orders you’ll also need to choose if they’re good till cancelled or choose an expiration date. If the order isn’t fulfilled by then, it’s cancelled. Finally, click place for a pending order, or buy or sell for a market order.

Once an order is placed or executed, for a market order, you can always change some of the parameters – mainly the levels of opening and closing orders. To close an open order, simply click on the tiny x over here. Notice the tick chart next to the order button. Make sure you have both ask and bid prices open and remember which way you’re going to make sure you know the opening and closing prices.
For a beginner, that’s about all you need to know. The main thing, though, is to practice. So go ahead.

Metatrader is of course not the only tool out there. The TradingLevel web app for example includes all of the must-have features, like Metatrader, in a more streamlined, easy to navigate interface. The beauty here is that you don’t need to download anything. Just login from your browser, be it on your phone or home PC, to maintain your portfolio where you’re at. Anywhere with an internet connection, of course.