MetaTrader 4 (MT4) — With the Terminal Closed · Tanzania
Levels left in MetaTrader 4 go on working after the program is closed. What runs inside the program stops with it, and the two groups are worth telling apart.
Open Exness Account →Closing MetaTrader 4 withdraws nothing from the market. A pending order the server accepted keeps its level and can trigger with the terminal shut down, and stop-loss and take-profit levels travel with the position rather than with the window that set them. What does stop is everything that executes inside the program: expert advisors, alerts and scripts run on the machine, so they end when the machine or the terminal does.
Measured order execution — Standard
How orders actually filled when real market orders were placed on Exness’s MT5 feed — fill time, slippage and rejects by order size:
| Instrument | Order size | Avg fill | Avg slippage | Fails |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EURUSDm | 0.01 lot | 151 ms | -0.333 pts | 0 |
| EURUSDm | 0.1 lot | 151 ms | -0.333 pts | 0 |
| EURUSDm | 1.0 lot | 146 ms | -0.333 pts | 0 |
| GBPUSDm | 0.01 lot | 141 ms | 0.667 pts | 0 |
| GBPUSDm | 0.1 lot | 130 ms | 0.0 pts | 0 |
| GBPUSDm | 1.0 lot | 135 ms | 0.333 pts | 0 |
| XAUUSDm | 0.01 lot | 141 ms | 0.0 pts | 0 |
| XAUUSDm | 0.1 lot | 151 ms | 80.0 pts | 0 |
| XAUUSDm | 1.0 lot | 130 ms | -72.333 pts | 0 |
Small sample (a few round-trips per size); indicative. The same pricing engine feeds every platform the broker offers.
MetaTrader 4 (MT4) at Exness
- A pending order the server has accepted keeps its level, so it can trigger with the terminal shut down.
- Stop loss and take profit attached to a position are held with the position, not with the window that set them.
- An expert advisor runs inside the terminal: closing the terminal stops it, and it resumes only when the program is opened again.
- Alerts and custom scripts are local for the same reason — the machine is where they execute.
- Chart templates, indicator sets and the arrangement of windows are stored on the machine.
- A terminal left running overnight adds nothing to an order that is already on the server.
- Leaving the terminal open is worth doing only for the things that live inside it.
Get started
Download MetaTrader 4 (MT4) from your Personal Area area after you open an account, or try it first on a free demo.
Open Exness Account →Two places where an instruction can live
Once an instruction has been accepted by the server it is no longer a thing on your computer. It has a level, a symbol and a size on the broker side, and it is checked against the market there. The terminal that created it has no further role in whether it fires.
An expert advisor is the opposite case. It is not an instruction at all until it decides to send one, and the deciding happens inside the running program. Shut the program and the deciding stops, even though everything it sent earlier is untouched.
What an overnight terminal is actually for
Leaving MetaTrader 4 open all night does nothing for a pending order or a protective level. Those are already somewhere else, and an extra copy of the screen does not make them more likely to work.
It does something for the local half: an advisor that has to keep evaluating, an alert that has to fire on this machine, a script that has to keep running. That is the honest list, and it is shorter than the habit of leaving the terminal open suggests.
What a closed terminal cannot do
A closed terminal cannot modify anything. Moving a level, cancelling an order, closing a position early — all of those are instructions, and instructions need a running window and a connection to be sent from.
It also cannot tell you anything. The account went on changing, and the first thing a reopened terminal does is ask the server what happened rather than reconstruct it from what was on screen last time.