[newbie question] Basic MetaEditor 4 vs 5 with MetaTrader 4?

Trading Systems Expert Advisors and Automated Trading
1

I was hoping someone would be able to point me in the right direction regarding MetaEditor.

I’m new to the world of Forex, but not to trading. I’ve recently found myself more interested in learning to develop trading systems and have been doing some basic reading on MetaTrader 4.

I have a demo account with Oanda which uses MT4, so I was under the assumption that I’d be learning MQL4. After doing some reading, finally firing up Meta Editor, and as I was about to play around with some basic code, I realized it was MetaEditor 5/ MQL5 (?).

Is this normal? Does this mean I have to learn MQL5 if I want to develop indicators or EAs?

Sorry if this comes up absolutely newbish, but I can’t seem to track down an answer anywhere.

Any insight or direction would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

2

Did you open the editor from within MT4 ? What makes you beleive its MQL5 ?

3

When I open MetaTrader 4 > About, I see:
MetaTrader 4 Build 646

Then when I click on the MetaEditor Button > About, I see:
MetaEditor 5 Build 934
For documentation, articles, code base, and forum please visit:
mql5.com

Is this how its suppose to be?

Thanks for your help,

4

Yes, that is all how it is supposed to be. Just create an EA and you’ll see that it gets the suffix .mq4

5

awesome, thanks for clarifying that. I didn’t want to waste time learning mql4 if I indeed had to move onto mql5 to get thing working.

Thanks again, definitely appreciate it.

6

Hey nubsauce; you maybe want to consider leaving MT5 alone and focus on MT4 , because neither brokers nor traders like MT5. A google search will tell you why.

7

Yeah, i’m definitely staying away from MT5.

After further research I realized that the thing that initially confused me was the fact that I was reading up on an outdated MQL4 pdf file that didn’t reflect updates that took place this year.

As a result, while I was reading about ‘int start’, when I opened MetaEditor I would see ‘void onstart’ etc.

Now that I have that cleared up I can finally take a confident step forward.

Thanks again,