Hi! My name is Andrey and am a product manager with 12 years in FinTech behind me. Today I am going to share some of my thoughts on the new web trading terminal MetaQuotes recently released.
Ok, so they say the WebTerminal is completely new. Well, it is something from this age to replace MetaQuotes’ previous terminal, however, I can’t get rid of a feeling that I have seen something like this before…
Wait a minute! It looks exactly like TradingView…
I don’t blame MetaQuotes. Even today TV still looks sharp and modern. But there is one thing that I find particularly interesting in this story.
I cannot be 100% sure, but it looks like the core of the new WebTrader is actually literary the TradingView — their charting library.
What I think I see right in the center of the MQ’s WebTrader is the free open-source version of TV’s charting library. This version of the library comes without UI, so the MQ team had to wrap it up with their, presumably, custom UI. The time scale labels seem to be customized a little bit. The number of chart types available in the demo is limited to modest 3 options: bars, area & candlesticks. I guess they had to implement their drawings, which would explain my bad user experience with them.
Right-click menu is absent. Volume histogram is there and according to the MQ team, it deserves 2 separate buttons: to apply it and to remove. Maybe this is a tribute to TV (they provide the volume histogram in the free version natively) since WebTrader seems to have an additional volume histogram that can be applied from the bottom of the indicator list.
I wonder why they didn’t release the comparison feature to have more than 1 instrument in a single chart window. At least I don’t see it in the demo mode. It is definitely there (in TV’s charting library).
Of course, the MQ team did a great job overall: drawings & indicators, order window, DoM window, orders and positions trackers, etc.
To wrap it up, I want to say that if you are building a platform inspired by another market player, using their technologies (even open-source ones) might not be the best choice. Obviously, creating everything from scratch is painful and time-consuming, but there are other great charting libraries at reasonable prices.