Choosing a broker by MetaTrader: the software is licensed, so it tells you nothing about the firm
MetaQuotes sells MT4 and MT5 to brokers and says outright that it provides no brokerage services. A firm running MetaTrader has bought a licence, and a licence is not a regulator.
Searches for “MT5 broker” and “broker for MetaTrader 4” run into thousands a month, and the premise underneath them is worth examining before the shortlist, because the premise is wrong.
MetaQuotes, which makes both platforms, describes its own business on the page where it sells them:
MetaQuotes is a software development company and does not provide investment or brokerage services
The platform is sold to brokers, in three licence tiers, and each broker deploys it on its own servers. So a firm offering MT5 has bought software. That is the entire content of the signal.
What the licence does not tell you
Who holds your deposit. The broker does, under whatever entity you contracted with, and MetaTrader has no view into that.
Which regulator, if any. The licence is sold to firms in every jurisdiction. An FCA firm and an unlicensed offshore shop run the same software, and the terminal looks identical in both.
How your order is executed. The platform passes orders to the broker’s own bridge. What happens next, and whether the broker takes the other side, is the broker’s business model rather than the platform’s. We set that distinction out in ECN, STP and market maker.
What the spread will be. Quoted by the broker, not the platform.
This is not a criticism of MetaTrader. It is a widely used, well built terminal, and the comparison of what each version does is a real question, covered in MT4 vs MT5. The error is treating a software choice as a due diligence step.
Why the belief persists
MetaTrader arrived when retail forex was consolidating, and for years the serious firms ran it while the improvised ones ran something homemade. Running MT4 genuinely did signal something around 2010.
It stopped signalling anything once the licence became a commodity. Today the entry tier is within reach of a firm registered last year in a jurisdiction with no financial supervisor, and we have written up several of those. HeroFX names no regulator anywhere on its site and runs MT5. GatesFX and FinPros run the same platform under very different licences.
The terminal is identical in all of them. The protection is not.
What to check instead, in the same ten minutes
The entity name in the client agreement, not the brand on the homepage. Brands and legal entities diverge constantly, and the entity is who you are actually contracting with.
That entity in the regulator’s own register. Not the number in the footer, the register itself. Our reviews do this on every firm, and the gap between claim and register is where most of the interesting findings sit.
The maximum leverage offered. It identifies the rulebook faster than any licence claim: nothing in the UK, EU or Australia permits anything near 1:500, so an offer of it tells you which regime you are under before you read a word of the terms.
Whether client money is segregated, and what compensation scheme, if any, stands behind the entity. Usually none outside the major jurisdictions.
What we checked, and what we didn’t
The quoted line comes from MetaQuotes’ own page for brokers, read on 17 August 2026, along with its description of the three licence tiers and self-hosted deployment.
We have not tested execution on any MetaTrader installation, compared bridges, or measured slippage between brokers running the same platform. Those differences are real and they are differences between brokers, which is the whole point of this page.
Sources
- MetaQuotes — MetaTrader 5 for brokers, licence types
- ASIC Financial Services Licensee Register
- FCA — Financial Services Register