Trading Platform Glossary: Every Button and Term Explained

Trading platforms bury simple ideas under unfamiliar words. This is every term you will meet in your first month on MT5 or MT4, explained in the order you will meet it.

Trading Platform Glossary at a glance

What it is and why it works

Parts of the platform. These are the panels and buttons you will use every day. Learn the four keyboard shortcuts and you will never be lost in the interface again.

• Market Watch (Ctrl+M); the list of instruments you can trade, with live bid and ask prices. Right-click it and choose Show All to see everything your broker offers.
• Navigator (Ctrl+N): the panel on the left listing your accounts, indicators, Expert Advisors and scripts. This is where an indicator appears after you install it.
• Toolbox (Ctrl+T): called the Terminal on MT4. The panel along the bottom holding your open positions, your trade history, and the log files that tell you why something failed.
• Journal and Experts tabs: the two log tabs inside the Toolbox. The Journal records what the platform did; the Experts tab records what your indicators and EAs did. Read these before asking anyone for help.
• Data folder; the folder on your computer where MetaTrader keeps indicators, templates and settings. Always reach it through File › Open Data Folder, never by browsing.
• Template (.tpl): a saved chart appearance: indicators, colours and settings, reapplied to any chart in one click.
• Profile: a saved set of open charts. Useful for switching between, say, a forex layout and an indices layout.

Files and add-ons. These are the things you install, and confusing one for another is the most common beginner error.

• Indicator: a program that analyses price and draws on the chart. It has no ability to place, close or modify a trade. Lives in MQL5 › Indicators.
• Expert Advisor (EA): a program that trades your account automatically, sending real orders to your broker. Lives in MQL5 › Experts. Also called a robot or a bot.
• Script: a program that performs a single action once and then stops, such as closing all open positions.
• .ex5 and.ex4: compiled, ready-to-run program files for MT5 and MT4 respectively.
• .mq5 and.mq4, the readable source code versions, which must be compiled in MetaEditor before the platform will run them.
• .set file, a saved set of an indicator’s or EA’s input values. Load it rather than typing values in by hand.
• MetaEditor: the code editor built into MetaTrader, used to compile .mq5 files into .ex5.
• AutoTrading: the toolbar button that permits Expert Advisors to place orders. Green means allowed. Irrelevant to indicators.
• WebRequest: permission for a tool to reach the internet, granted per address under Tools › Options › Expert Advisors.
• Repainting: when an indicator changes its past signals after the fact, making its history look far better than what it actually showed at the time.

Trade and order terms. These describe what you are actually doing when you press buy or sell.

• Bid and ask, the price you can sell at, and the price you can buy at. The ask is always the higher of the two.
• Spread: the gap between them, and your immediate cost on entering. A trade starts slightly negative because of it.
• Pip: the standard small unit of price movement, normally the fourth decimal place on a currency pair. A point is a tenth of that on five-decimal pricing.
• Lot: the unit of position size. A standard lot is 100,000 units of the base currency; a mini lot is 0.1 and a micro lot is 0.01.
• Market order: buy or sell now at the current price. Limit order: buy lower or sell higher than now. Stop order: buy higher or sell lower than now, used for breakouts.
• Stop loss: a resting order that closes the trade at a defined loss. Take profit, the same at a defined gain.
• Slippage, being filled at a worse price than you asked for, because the market moved between your click and the fill.
• Requote, the broker declining your price and offering a new one. More common on MT4 and on some execution models.
• Swap: the interest charged or paid for holding a position overnight. Usually charged three times on Wednesday to cover the weekend.
• Trailing stop; a stop loss that moves in your favour automatically as price does, and never moves back.

Account numbers. These four figures sit at the bottom of the Toolbox and describe the health of your account. Understanding margin level in particular can save you an account.

• Balance, your account total excluding open trades.
• Equity, your balance adjusted for the current profit or loss on open trades. This is the real number.
• Margin, the deposit held by the broker to keep your open positions.
• Free margin, equity minus margin: what is left to open more, or to absorb losses.
• Margin level, equity divided by margin, as a percentage. As it falls you approach a margin call, a warning that you are running out of room, and then a stop out, where the broker closes positions automatically to protect itself.
• Leverage: how much position size your deposit controls, expressed as a ratio such as 1:30 or 1:500. It does not create risk by itself; using it to open oversized positions does.
• Netting and hedging, on a hedging account you can hold a long and a short on the same symbol at once; on a netting account you cannot. Set by the broker when the account is opened.

How to trade it, step by step

1. Learn the four panel shortcuts first. Ctrl+M opens Market Watch, Ctrl+N opens the Navigator, Ctrl+T opens the Toolbox, and Ctrl+R opens the Strategy Tester. Those four cover almost everything you will need to find, and closing a panel by accident stops being a crisis once you know how to bring it back.
2. Turn on all your broker’s symbols. Right-click inside Market Watch and choose Show All, or open the symbol list and enable the ones you want. New accounts often display only a handful by default, which is why beginners conclude their broker does not offer gold or indices when it does.
3. Read a symbol’s specification before trading it. Right-click the symbol in Market Watch and choose Specification. It tells you the contract size, the minimum and maximum lot size, the tick value, the swap rates, the trading session hours, and the minimum stop distance. That last one explains why a stop placed very close to price is sometimes rejected.
4. Practise reading the four account numbers. Open a small position on a demo account and watch balance, equity, margin and free margin at the bottom of the Toolbox. Notice that equity moves and balance does not. Notice how much margin one small position consumes. This is the fastest way to understand what leverage actually means.
5. Place every trade with a stop loss attached at the ticket. In the order window, set the stop loss and take profit fields before you click. A stop entered at the ticket sits on the broker’s server, so it protects you even if your computer sleeps or your internet drops. An intention to close manually does not.
6. Learn where the log files are before you need them. Press Ctrl+T and look at the Journal and Experts tabs. When an order is rejected or an indicator fails to load, the reason is written there in plain English. Reading it yourself resolves most problems faster than asking anyone.
7. Save your chart as a template once you like it. Right-click the chart, choose Template, then Save Template. You can then apply the same setup to any other chart in two clicks instead of rebuilding it. Save it as default and every new chart you open will use it automatically.
8. Look up anything else as you meet it. You do not need to memorise this page. Keep the full trading glossary open in a tab and check terms as they appear, rather than trying to learn the vocabulary before you start.

Size every one of those entries with the position size calculator and check the trade is worth taking with the risk/reward calculator before you commit.

The conditions it needs

Complete beginners on their first week

The interface is the first barrier and it is a purely mechanical one. An hour spent learning what each panel is called and does removes a surprising amount of the anxiety around placing a first trade, because most of that anxiety is about not knowing which button does what.

Traders moving between MT4 and MT5

The vocabulary is almost identical across the two platforms, with a few naming differences, MT4 calls the bottom panel the Terminal, MT5 calls it the Toolbox, and the folders are MQL4 versus MQL5. Knowing which terms carry over makes the switch trivial.

Anyone about to install their first indicator

Most failed installations come down to vocabulary: not knowing what the data folder is, or that indicators and Expert Advisors live in different folders. Understanding those two terms prevents nearly every common error.

Traders who have been guessing

Plenty of people trade for months without knowing what margin level means or why swap appeared on their account overnight. There is no embarrassment in that, and closing those gaps is worth more than any new strategy.

When it fails

• Confusing an indicator with an Expert Advisor. An indicator draws; an EA trades. They are installed in different folders and have completely different consequences if something goes wrong. If you are ever unsure which you have been given, check which folder the vendor told you to use.
• Assuming balance is what you have. Balance ignores your open positions entirely. Equity is your actual current value, and it is the number the broker uses to decide whether to close your positions. Traders watching balance during a drawdown are watching a figure that has not caught up yet.
• Treating leverage as the source of risk. High leverage does not automatically mean high risk; it only means you can open a larger position for a given deposit. Risk comes from position size relative to your account and your stop distance, which is entirely under your control via the position size calculator.
• Ignoring swap on longer holds. Overnight financing is charged every night a position stays open, and typically at triple rate on Wednesdays to account for the weekend. On a trade held for weeks it can quietly become a significant cost, and on some instruments it is much larger than beginners expect.
• Not knowing about the minimum stop distance. Brokers set a minimum distance between the current price and any stop or limit order. A very tight stop can simply be rejected, and the error message in the Journal is the only clue. Check the symbol specification if an order will not go through.
• Learning the words instead of the trading. Vocabulary is a one-week problem. Risk management and consistency are the multi-year problem. Do not mistake fluency in platform terminology for progress; the learn section covers what actually matters next.

For different levels of experience

If you are brand new

You do not need to memorise any of this. Read it once so the words are familiar, then come back when you meet one you do not recognise.

If you only take three things away, take these. First, equity is your real account value and balance is not: balance ignores your open trades. Second, an indicator cannot trade your account and an Expert Advisor can, so be very clear which one you are installing. Third, File › Open Data Folder is how you find where indicators go, and using that menu item instead of browsing prevents most installation problems.

Everything else you will absorb by using the platform. Open a demo account, place a few trades, watch the numbers at the bottom of the screen move, and the vocabulary will attach itself to things you have actually seen. That is far more effective than trying to learn it in advance.

If your results are inconsistent

If you have been trading a while, the terms worth revisiting are the account ones, because they are the ones people quietly guess at. Specifically: margin level. It is equity divided by margin as a percentage, and it is the number your broker watches. When it falls to the broker’s margin call threshold you get a warning, and at the stop out level positions are closed automatically without your involvement.

The practical implication is that a stop out is not something that happens to reckless traders in the abstract; it happens whenever open positions consume too much of the account relative to equity. Knowing your broker’s specific margin call and stop out levels, which are in your account documentation, tells you exactly how much room you have.

The other one worth checking is your symbol specifications. Contract size, tick value, minimum stop distance and swap rates vary between brokers and between symbols on the same broker. If you trade several instruments and have never opened the specification window, you are almost certainly making assumptions that are wrong on at least one of them.

If you are experienced

The terminology gaps that matter at a professional level are the ones with structural consequences rather than definitional ones. Account mode is the clearest: netting versus hedging is fixed at account creation and changes how position management code behaves, silently. An MT4-derived system that treats every ticket as an independent position will produce incorrect net exposure on a netting account without generating a single error.

Symbol specification drift is the second. Contract size, minimum stop level, margin requirement, commission and swap all change over time and vary between brokers, and MT5’s Strategy Tester applies today’s values across the whole historical period. Anything sensitive to stop-level constraints or financing cost is being validated against a market structure that never existed.

Third, be precise about what "volume" means on your feed. On forex and CFD symbols MT5’s volume histogram counts price updates from your broker, not contracts traded, and the tick rate depends on that broker’s feed characteristics. Any tool or system whose logic assumes traded-volume semantics is measuring something different from what its author intended.

Risk management for this strategy

Two terms on this page have direct, immediate financial consequences and are worth understanding properly rather than approximately.

Margin level determines whether your broker closes your positions for you. It is equity divided by used margin, expressed as a percentage, and every broker publishes a margin call level and a stop out level. When equity falls far enough that margin level hits the stop out threshold, positions are closed automatically in whatever order the broker chooses, usually at the worst possible moment. Keeping open positions modest relative to the account is what prevents this, and no indicator or platform feature will do it for you.

Lot size determines how much a given price move costs you. It is not a setting to be adjusted by feel or copied from someone else. Work it out from the distance between your entry and your stop, and the fixed percentage of your account you are willing to lose on the trade, using the position size calculator. If you learn only one calculation in your first month, learn this one.

Where Market Structure Pro fits

Market Structure Pro is a custom indicator for MetaTrader 5, which in the vocabulary of this page means it analyses and draws but has no ability to place, close or modify any trade. That distinction matters; it is not an Expert Advisor, it is not a bot, and it never touches your account.

What it does is take 27 separate analytical tools and resolve them into one verdict on the chart: TRADE, TRANSITION or NO TRADE, with a confidence percentage, an A/B/C grade and a plain-English explanation of what is supporting or limiting that call. The explanation is deliberately written in ordinary language rather than indicator jargon, because a reading you cannot interpret is not decision support.

Two of its properties connect to terms defined above. It is non-repainting: state locks on the closed bar, so a verdict does not quietly change once you have scrolled past it. And it is spread-aware and session-aware, which means it accounts for two of the costs and conditions that beginners typically discover the expensive way. Its ranging filter exists to say NO TRADE when conditions are choppy or dead. It is decision support only; it does not place trades, it is not a signal service, and it guarantees nothing. It runs on MT5 today, with MT4, TradingView and cTrader versions planned but not yet released. The install page covers setup.

Frequently asked questions

What is Market Watch in MT5?

It is the panel listing the instruments you can trade along with their live bid and ask prices. Open it with Ctrl+M. New accounts often show only a few symbols, so right-click inside it and choose Show All to see everything your broker offers, and right-click a symbol and choose Specification to see its contract details.

What is the difference between an indicator and an Expert Advisor?

An indicator analyses price and draws on the chart, and it cannot open, close or modify any position. An Expert Advisor is a program that places and manages real trades on your account automatically. They are installed in different folders, Indicators and Experts, and mixing them up is the most common installation mistake.

What is the difference between balance and equity?

Balance is your account total excluding any open positions, so it only changes when a trade closes. Equity is your balance adjusted for the current profit or loss on everything still open, which makes it your real current value. Your broker uses equity, not balance, when deciding whether to issue a margin call.

What is margin level and why does it matter?

Margin level is your equity divided by your used margin, shown as a percentage at the bottom of the Toolbox. As it falls you approach your broker’s margin call level, which is a warning, and then the stop out level, at which the broker automatically closes positions to protect itself. Both thresholds are set by your broker and published in your account terms.

What is a lot in forex?

A lot is the unit of position size. One standard lot is 100,000 units of the base currency, a mini lot is 0.1 of that, and a micro lot is 0.01. The lot size you choose determines how much money each pip of movement is worth, which is why it should be calculated from your stop distance rather than chosen by habit.

What is swap in trading?

Swap is the interest charged or paid for holding a position past the daily rollover, reflecting the interest rate difference between the two currencies or the financing cost on a CFD. It is usually charged at triple rate on Wednesday to cover the weekend. On trades held for weeks it can become a meaningful cost, and the exact rates are in the symbol’s specification.

What is slippage?

Slippage is being filled at a different price from the one you clicked, because the market moved in the instants between your order and its execution. It is most pronounced around scheduled news, at session opens, and on thinly traded instruments. It can go in your favour but more often does not, and no platform setting eliminates it.

What does it mean when an indicator repaints?

It means the indicator alters or removes signals after the bars have completed, so a historical chart shows what it concluded later rather than what it displayed at the time. Repainting tools look remarkably accurate on past data and behave very differently live. You can test for it by replaying the indicator in the Strategy Tester’s visual mode.

Where is the MetaTrader data folder?

It is a folder in your user profile, not where the program was installed, and you should never try to find it by browsing. Open MetaTrader and click <span class="mono">File › Open Data Folder</span>, which takes you straight to the right place for the terminal you currently have open. Indicators go inside it under MQL5 (or MQL4) and then Indicators.

Related reading

• Full trading glossary: Market terminology beyond the platform itself.
• Install Market Structure Pro: Putting the data folder and Navigator knowledge to use.
• Learn to trade: What to work on once the vocabulary stops being the obstacle.
• Free trading tools: Calculators for lot size, pip value and risk-reward.
• Try a demo account: The fastest way to attach these words to things you have actually seen.