The LSE Directory / Charting platforms
MetaQuotes Software Corp. is a financial trading software developer, established in 2000 and headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus. Its flagship products are MetaTrader 4, launched in 2005, and MetaTrader 5, launched in 2010, desktop, web and mobile platforms that provide charting, technical analysis, order management, market depth and automated trading. MetaQuotes is a software vendor, not a broker; it does not offer investment or brokerage services itself. Brokers, banks and exchanges license the platforms and distribute them to end clients, who trade through the broker's own account infrastructure rather than through MetaQuotes directly. The company's core differentiator is its B2B licensing model combined with an extensive third-party ecosystem. Trading logic on both platforms is built in the proprietary MQL4 and MQL5 languages, developed and tested in the bundled MetaEditor IDE and Strategy Tester, which lets users write custom indicators, scripts and automated "Expert Advisor" trading robots. Around this, MetaQuotes runs MQL5.community, a marketplace for buying and renting trading robots and indicators, a signal-based copy-trading service, and a freelance marketplace connecting traders with MQL developers. For broker back-end integration, MetaQuotes also supplies Web API, FIX API and Manager/Server API products, and separately offers Finteza, a web and app analytics tool unrelated to trading. MT4 became the de facto standard platform for retail forex trading through the 2007 to 2010 period on the strength of its customization and broker ecosystem, and remained the more widely used of the two platforms for years after MT5's 2010 release; industry reporting in 2025 pointed to MT5 trading volume finally overtaking MT4 industry-wide, with MT5 now the platform most commonly cited as the default choice for brokers building a multi-asset, mainstream offering. MetaQuotes describes its broker and bank client base as running into the hundreds of financial institutions worldwide. Multiple industry sources, including Crunchbase and Finance Magnates' executive directory, identify Renat Fatkhullin as the company's co-founder and CEO. In September 2022, Apple removed the MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 apps from the App Store over App Store Review Guidelines non-compliance; both apps were reinstated by March 2023 after MetaQuotes made the required changes, an episode that illustrates the platform-distribution risk MetaQuotes and its broker licensees carry given how central the mobile apps are to retail access.
