Six Regions, Six Platform Identities: Why North America Remains MT4's Last Holdout?

Global platform-visibility rankings mask the regional fragmentation in retail FX/CFD platform choice. FM Intelligence data covering Q4 2024 through Q1 2026 shows the shift from MT4 to MT5 is happening at six different speeds across regions, while xStation's lead in the global visibility rankings derives from a single broker's European market presence.

North America remains the only region where MT4 retains higher web visibility than MT5, with an MT5-to-MT4 ratio of 0.87 in Q1 2026 against ratios ranging from 1.78 in Europe to 3.38 in MENA. Africa's platform traffic concentrates at 91.0% on MetaQuotes platforms (MT4 plus MT5 combined), the highest level of two-vendor reliance globally. Europe shows the opposite extreme: 91.8% of regional platform traffic flowed to xStation in Q1 2026, with 83.2% of all xStation visibility worldwide originating in Europe, indicating that xStation's global ranking reflects XTB S.A.'s European broker footprint rather than independent platform demand. MetaQuotes' share of regional platform traffic increased in North America over the past year by 2.8 percentage points while declining in four of the five other regions.