MT4: How to open a trade

*Since the recording of these videos, negative balance protection has come into force from 02.10.17. This means that whilst trading losses cannot exceed funds in your account, your capital is still at risk.

In this lesson, you’ll learn:

• How to open a trade from the Market Watch window
• How to open a trade right from the chart
• What one-click trading is and how to activate this feature

Placing a trade on MT4 trading platform is really simple, intuitive and fast. MT4 offers you several ways of placing a trade, which are explained below:

New order window

The first way to place a trade is by finding the market of interest in the Market Watch window. Once you’ve found the market you want to open a position on, double-click on the market’s name and an order window will appear.

When the order window opens, choose the volume of transaction in lots (remember: 1 lot is equivalent to 100,000 units of the base currency, so proportionally 0.1 lot is 10,000 and 0.01 is 1,000 units of the base currency), and whether to apply a Stop Loss or Take Profit level.

You can then place your trade in two ways: instantly, or as a pending order. You also have the option to write a comment on your trade, to keep trading notes or a diary on each of your positions.

Once you’ve selected your volume, you need to decide the direction of your trade. If you expect that the market will go up then ‘go long’ and click ‘buy by market’ button. If you expect that the market will go down then ‘go short’ and click ‘sell by market’ button.

Once you’ve done this, your trade will be placed and that’s it. From now your orders are visible in the ‘Trade’ tab in the Terminal window.

One-click trading

You can do it even faster by using the one-click trading option. To activate it click menu Tools -> Options

Select the ‘Trade’ tab and check the ‘One Click Trading’ option.

Once one-click trading has been activated, you’ve analysed a certain market and would like to place a trade, you’re able to do so from the top left-hand corner of the chart - where the buy and sell buttons are available, with the option of modifying the volume as well.

Trading from the chart

Another way to open a position is to right-click on the chart window and select ‘Trading’ and then ‘New order’ and the order window will appear.

Closing positions

To close an open position click the ‘x’ in the Trade tab in the Terminal window.

Or right-click the line order on the chart and select ‘close’.

If you’d like to close only a part of position, click the right-click on the open order and select ‘Modify’. Then, in the Type field select instant execution and choose what part of the position you want to close.

As you can see opening and closing your trades is very intuitive on MT4 and it literally takes one click.