Why MT4 availability keeps shrinking
MetaTrader 4 is no longer actively developed: nine timeframes, a single-threaded tester, no native order book, and an instrument universe that in practice stops at forex and a handful of CFDs. The real cause of its retreat, though, is commercial. Tighter licensing conditions applied to the white labels serving prop firms pushed much of the sector toward MT5, cTrader, DXtrade and proprietary web platforms. A firm advertising MT4 today may quietly migrate a few months from now.
That instability matters at purchase time. Look for what the rulebook says about a platform change mid-evaluation: is the account transferred, reset, extended, refunded? Silence on that question is itself a data point, and worth weighing before you commit to an evaluation that runs for weeks.
What to check before paying for an MT4 challenge
Three technical details end more MT4 evaluations than bad entries do.
Server time comes first. Session-based systems and the daily loss calculation both depend on the server’s GMT offset, which differs between brokers and shifts at daylight-saving changeovers. A system calibrated on another offset will not behave identically.
Symbol naming comes second. A suffix appended to currency pairs is enough to stop an expert advisor from locating the instrument, or to distort its position-size calculation.
Licensing comes third. Most commercial EAs are locked to an account number, and moving to a funded account produces a new one, sometimes meaning another licence to buy. Around those, the usual checks still apply: hedging, partial closes, maximum lot size per symbol, and the treatment of positions held over news and weekends.
Where MT4 still makes sense
The natural user is the long-standing algorithmic trader with a tested MQL4 portfolio and custom indicators they have no intention of rewriting. The arithmetic is simple: as long as porting costs more than the comfort of a modern platform, staying on MT4 is rational. For a discretionary multi-asset trader, or for anyone building a toolkit from scratch today, the ecosystem is contracting too quickly to bet on. In that situation, the sensible move is to pass the evaluation on a platform that will still be supported in two years.