MetaQuotes: 7 Years of Services!

MetaQuotes Software Corp. was founded on the 27th of November 2000. Its only activity was and still is development of software for financial markets. The company has achieved much within the last 7 years. We have developed 4 trading platforms, 4 mobile terminals, created 4 development environments for automated trading, issued one book, and are preparing another one for publishing. Besides, we are organizers of two world championships — Automated Trading Championship 2006/2007.

When developing our trading platforms, we always do our best to make them really world-beating. We care of both their functionality and efficiency, and friendliness. For this reason, we always spent really much time and efforts on development of user interfaces of our software. In order to provide users with the most functional tools, we were always interested in knowing traders’ and brokers’ opinions, welcomed their comments and suggestions. All this wasn’t in vain. Today, due to its characteristics, our MetaTrader 4 is the most commonly used trading platform in the world, and traders choose our trading terminals most frequently.

Technological development produced the need and the possibility to create client terminals for mobile devices. We were among the first to provide traders with mobile terminals having developed them for our trading platform, MetaTrader 3. The programs were highly estimated by users.

Of course, the demand was not really high at that time, but it kept growing, so we received evidence that had been an upcoming trend in the field of trading technologies. Taking up the development of trading platform MetaTrader 4, we were sure that mobile terminals would be in high demand. Several years of working in this direction produced good results. Today, mobile technologies in trading are perceived as a matter of course, and one in ten of our traders use them in their daily activities.

One more upcoming trend in development was automated trading. Even our second platform, MetaQuotes, included in 2001 an integrated programming language for writing trading strategies, MetaQuotes Language (MQL). Programs intended for automated trading were called ’Expert Advisors’. Traders used them to automate their analyses of price movements and their trading as such, as well as to create their custom indicators.

At that time, a group of our traders writing their own Expert Advisors (EAs) came into being and started to grow. When developing the next platforms, we did not omit to support them and continuously improved the programming language and the environment in whole. Striving after providing traders with the best development environment and the amplest opportunities, we developed a language named MQL4. By its features, it became the best language intended for programming trading strategies and custom indicators. Since it was released, automated trading has significantly grown in popularity, and the number of Expert Advisors’ writers has essentially increased.

Automated trading boom led us to the idea of organizing a global contest among Expert Advisors. An important feature of the contest had to be full transparency and availability of all materials, as well as absolute independency of EAs. Gradually, having considered these and some other issues, we concluded that we were able to organize such a contest.

Having considered all pros and cons, we took it up, so our first championship, the Automated Trading Championship 2006 took place from the 1st of October to the 25th of December 2006. 258 developers from all over the world participated in it, and three Winners shared the prize of totally 80 000 US dollars. That Championship aroused much interest in traders. Moreover, since it was absolutely open, the Championship allowed us to collect fids of very helpful information that could be used by everybody in his or her research and development. Considering high estimate made by traders and the identified need in such a contest, we decided to make it annual.

Helping traders in their hard work, we always did our best to provide them with as much information as possible. With this object in mind, we launched different websites and communities, published articles and communicated on forums. We also published the book named Forex: From Simple to Sophisticated intended for high readership of traders. We are working on the second book now that will be devoted to automated trading. It is planned to be released in electronic format and for free. We hope that the second book will be useful for traders, too, and help them to explore the market better.

Looking back through 7 years of our services, we understand very well that traders and brokers play the most important role in our company’s life. These were mostly your comments and suggestions that allowed us to create really functional and user-friendly software solutions. These are you who help us to become leaders on the market and who make our solutions the most popular ones in the entire world.

Many thanks to you all!