Introduction to MT5 plugins
MT5 plugins, add-ons, apps, and other sophisticated solutions help brokers fine-tune their MetaTrader 5 (MT5) trading platform. MT5 is undoubtedly a powerful multi-asset trading platform millions of users use worldwide. It enables brokerages to work with multiple symbol types, including investment funds and ETFs, analyze business performance, and provide a smooth trading experience.
However, with so many tech providers vouching for the best MT5 plugins, choosing the right solutions can be overwhelming. Luckily, our team has prepared an overview of key MT5 plugins you can use to optimize and automate your risk management processes.
What are MT5 Plugins?
MT5 plugins give you extra control over your trading. These tools work alongside your broker’s platform to make trading easier.
You might think plugins work like trading signals, but they’re different. Signals tell you when prices change. Plugins do way more than that. Want to manage your money better? Copy successful traders? Know your swap fees? Create trading reports? Plugins handle all of that.
MetaTrader5 Plugins For New Symbols
The forex world has changed a lot. Traders want more than just major currency pairs now. They look for new ways to make money and explore different markets. To stay ahead, your brokerage needs a full trading menu. Think cryptocurrency, metals, futures, forex, and market indices. Your trades must run fast, with tight spreads and zero delays.
If you want to add more trading options, you’ve got choices. You can work with multiple liquidity providers and market data sources. But this costs a lot and creates headaches. You might not find the symbols you need or struggle to merge price quotes into your system.
With the help of MT 5 plugins, you can add new symbols without breaking the bank. Your clients get the trading tools they want, and you keep costs down.
1. Synthetic Symbols
Besides opting for traditional symbols, you can provide a unique trading experience by creating new trading instruments. When creating a synthetic symbol, all you need is market data. That’s easy to get—you can acquire it or merge it with other symbols’ data to provide quotes for the newly created symbol. However, the main challenge of providing synthetic symbols is liquidity since the new trading instrument may be available from only one liquidity provider, who can sometimes be you, yourself.
The Synthetic Symbols plugin creates new trading pairs by adjusting existing ones. For cryptocurrency trading, this solves the decimal point challenge. Instead of showing TRX at $0.02986537, you display TRX1000 at $29.86537. This gives traders clearer prices and better trading precision.
The plugin also manages risk effectively. It converts prices to their original form during trade execution. This enables safe hedging of trades with new instruments.
2. Futures Rollovers
Brokers that offer CFD trading on futures often allow clients to hold positions on the expiry date, which often results in difficulties when reassigning trades to new symbols. This is the problem that MT5 plugins like Future Rollovers are designed to solve.
The plugin simplifies the rollover process for mature symbols according to schedule. It switches clients’ positions to a new future symbol, calculates the price difference between two mapped symbols, and processes it as a balance operation. You can check all past rollovers through the dashboard, making it easy to track changes and spot any problems early.
Swap Fees Configuration
Straight Through Processing (STP) brokers have to regularly update swaps for all symbols according to the information from a liquidity provider. Going through platform settings manually takes too much time and leads to mistakes. Working with multiple liquidity providers makes this even harder.
Brokers can control swaps more effectively or even automate updating processes using small MT5 plugins.
3. Symbol Editor
Symbol Editor offers brokers an opportunity to update swaps in bulk. One of the solution’s key advantages is the ability to edit symbols in a list according to the liquidity providers’ data instead of configuring settings one by one.
Symbol Editor can be set up to update swaps on a schedule automatically. Additionally, the application has a handy interface that can be easily connected remotely with the MetaTrader platform for a convenient way of working with symbol settings.
4. Swap Manager
Symbols act as your main touchpoints with traders. You promote new trading options, keep costs low, and control your profits through them. With multiple ways to handle swap fees, the Swap Manager MT5 plugin adds more power to your MetaTrader platform. Set fixed fees for each trade, charge per lot, or add markup percentages on top of default swap values.
The flexible configuration of swap-free periods allows you to create comfortable trading conditions by minimizing traders’ costs. Guide traders toward new instruments by dropping or removing swap fees on their first trades with these symbols.
MetaTrader5 Plugins for Risk Mitigation During Market Volatility
All financial markets heavily rely on news and economic indicators. The whole market stops “breathing” whilst waiting for announcements from such major events and the subsequent price movement. This behavior quite frequently leads to market uncertainty and potential price gaps, which can cause unpredictable trading results for positions that were kept open during the news event. Brokerages resort to different risk management techniques to protect their business and clients’ funds.
Risks revolving around major news events can be mitigated by raising margin requirements during high volatility or limiting the maximum number of positions a trader can hold. However, trying to manually adjust settings and implement individual risk management strategies across all affected trading accounts becomes a cumbersome process at a time when actions have to be quick and effective.
Multiple MT5 add-ons are there to solve these issues and ultimately automate and optimize such important processes. Among these, three MetaTrader 5 plugins cannot be missed: Dynamic Margin and Leverage, and Trade Copier.
5. Dynamic Margin and Leverage
Financial markets are competitive, and to stand out, you might offer higher leverage to attract new clients. While this can be effective, regulators like ESMA and ASIC set limits, and you need to manage risks carefully to keep your business stable in the long run.
Your approach to margin requirements and leverage depends on how you balance risk and opportunity. Risk managers often push for higher margin requirements and lower leverage to reduce potential losses and create a more predictable environment.
One way to manage risk is by automatically adjusting leverage based on your client’s balance. This setup prevents clients from opening oversized positions as their balance grows. By lowering leverage at specific balance levels, you allow margin trading while keeping risks in check for your firm and clients. MT5 plugins like Dynamic Margin and Leverage let you set balance thresholds with corresponding leverage and filter accounts by MetaTrader 5 ID and currency.
Another way to control risk is temporarily raising margin requirements for certain assets when volatility increases. For example, before OPEC’s meeting on November 30, 2020, oil prices were expected to fluctuate based on production decisions. To prepare for events like this, you can adjust margin rules for oil-related assets in advance, helping you stay ahead of sudden market swings.
6. Trade Copier
There are several effective risk management strategies, and to execute them swiftly and effectively, you need to monitor information about clients’ positions in real-time. To estimate the consequences of increased margin requirements or to decide what positions should be hedged, use the MT5 Trade Copier to aggregate open positions on specific symbols and get a quick snapshot of clients’ exposure.
Such MetaTrader 5 add-ons copy positions from one or several clients to a coverage account based on configurable rules. You can adjust settings such as volume multipliers and symbol filters or even choose to place a limit order instead of directly copying trades. This way, you can aggregate trades from the entire server and accurately assess the potential impact of planned adjustments to your risk management processes.
Advanced setup of Stop-out and Margin-call
Nowadays, most brokers are established with a hybrid business model. They use the speed of market maker execution with risk management through hedging at liquidity providers. This execution model offers the flexibility to either process all the clients’ risks in-house and cover losses with proprietary trading or to partially execute trades on specific symbols at a counterparty. When it comes to partial execution, users can customize several settings to ensure a smooth workflow and prevent abrupt losses.
7. Advanced Stopouts
Products such as Advanced Stopouts help brokers minimize potential losses for clients at Margin Calls and Stop Outs. With these MT5 plugins, you can set which trades are closed automatically and which should be kept open.
By default, MetaTrader closes non-profitable trades when a stop-out is triggered. To prevent this, you can hedge client positions by opening a reverse trade to free up the margin without forcing an immediate closure.
This gives traders extra time to decide whether to close losing positions or deposit more funds to restore their margin levels. You can set up hedging for specific symbols. This gives more control over risk management while helping protect your firm’s and your client’s funds.
8. Margin-credit Tracker
There are other ways to save both traders and brokers from critical losses. For instance, by removing credit, the Margin-credit tracker helps brokers prevent clients’ balances from dropping below zero. There are cases when traders’ losses are greater than the deposited funds, and they continue losing money with credit. When such losses are realized, the client ends with a negative balance. You can avoid this situation and prevent further damage by withdrawing these credits in time. Margin-credit tracker offers different ways to calculate the level when credits should be removed: an equity-to-credit ratio or a margin level without credit.
9. Bonus: MT5 Gateway
MT5 Gateway connects brokers to major trading platforms. You can get live market prices from places like AC Markets, DASTrader, and SAXO Bank. The system lets brokers place trades right away on these markets. You can also track your trades and see current prices in real-time.
The above MetaTrader 5 plugins can be easily combined with other MT4/5 plugins, solutions, and MetaTrader 5 add-ons. For instance, products such as Dynamic Margin and Leverage will help with Margin Calls and Stopouts events and provide advanced opportunities for other risk management activities.
Conclusion
This article is just a glimpse of the sophistication level that brokerage processes may reach using the right MT5 plugins. As you can see, there are multiple ways to approach specific challenges. To find the most effective and convenient solutions, seek expertise from companies like ours that already offer several turn-key software covering many tasks and processes.
If you would like to enquire about any of the MT5 plugins mentioned above or have a specific problem that you can’t quite resolve the way you like, drop us a line via [email protected]
More solutions for MetaTrader 5 at Forex Broker Solutions.
Elite Automation Package
Our Elite Automation Package is a comprehensive solution that includes all the above-mentioned MT5 plugins and is available at a monthly subscription.
Product packages are a convenient and cost-efficient way to acquire several apps and MT5 plugins. Each package is complemented with additional development and consultancy hours that enable brokers to fine-tune chosen products or gain operational insights from leading industry experts.
Schedule an introductory call via [email protected] or by filling out the form below to learn more about simple yet effective solutions for MetaTrader 5.
