Metatrader charts are basically the bread and butter of forex day trading and if youre not using them properly youre just guessing with extra steps. Most people start on MT4 because its free its everywhere and every broker under the sun supports it.. MT5 is technically the newer version but honestly the majority of retail traders are still on 4 and theres nothing wrong with that.
The first thing you want to do is strip everything back. Default charts come loaded with all sorts of rubbish colours and grid lines that make it look like a spreadsheet from 1997.. get rid of the grid change your background to black or dark grey and set your candles to something clean. Green and red works fine or white and black if youre old school. The point is you want to actually see price action without your eyes bleeding after 20 minutes of staring at it.
Timeframes matter more than people think. Most new day traders jump straight onto the 1 minute chart because they think faster means more opportunities which is technically true but its also more noise more fake signals and more chances to blow your account before lunch. The 15 minute and 1 hour charts give you a much better picture of whats actually happening.. use the higher timeframe to get your direction then drop down to the 5 minute for entries if you want to be more precise.
Indicators are where it gets controversial because half the trading internet will tell you price action is king and indicators are lagging garbage while the other half cant trade without 47 moving averages on screen. The truth is somewhere in the middle.. a couple of EMAs like the 20 and 50 period will show you the trend at a glance and RSI can help you spot when somethings been pushed too far in one direction. Beyond that youre just adding clutter for the sake of feeling clever.
One thing people dont talk about enough is how you set up your templates. Metatrader lets you save chart templates so once youve got your layout sorted with your preferred indicators colours and timeframe you can apply it to any pair in about 2 seconds. Same goes for profiles which save your entire workspace.. so if you trade London session with GBPUSD EURUSD and gold open you can load that whole setup with one click instead of faffing around every morning.
The chart tools built into MT4 are decent enough for drawing support and resistance levels trend lines and fibs.. nothing fancy but they do the job. If you want something more advanced like volume profile or order flow youll need to look at custom indicators or jump over to something like TradingView for analysis then execute on MT4.
Honestly the platform isnt pretty and it looks like it was designed in 2005 which it basically was.. but its fast its reliable and it does what you need it to do without getting in the way. Thats all you really want from a charting platform when youre trying to make money not win a design award.