A new FM Intelligence analysis, covering retail FX/CFD platform visibility across 121 countries from Q4 2024 through Q1 2026, finds the global shift from MetaTrader 4 to MetaTrader 5 moving at six different speeds depending on region. North America stands out as the only territory where MT4 still beats MT5 on web visibility.
Every other region has flipped to MT5 dominance, with MENA showing an MT5-to-MT4 ratio of 3.38, Africa at 2.70, and Europe at 1.78. North America sits at 0.87, the same range it has occupied for six straight quarters.
Six Regions, Six Platform Identities
The FM Intelligence tracks nine platforms across six regions and finds that no single one leads in more than three. xStation, the proprietary platform of Polish broker XTB, leads in Europe, LATAM and MENA. MT5 leads in APAC and Africa. MT4 leads only in North America.
That fragmentation contrasts with the global picture FM Intelligence reported earlier this year, when MT5 first crossed MT4 in trading volume at 54.2% of combined MetaQuotes volumes. By Q3 2025, MT5's share had widened to 62%, and the Q1 2026 Quarterly Report puts the figure at 65%.
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The web-visibility data converges with the volume picture at the global level. It diverges sharply at the regional level, especially in North America, where MetaQuotes' combined share of platform traffic actually rose 2.8 percentage points over the past year while declining in four of the five other regions.
Why North America Lags
The North American ratio has moved within a 0.81 to 0.95 band across six quarters, peaking at 0.95 in Q2 2025 before settling at 0.87 in Q1 2026. FM Intelligence points to two structural factors that may help explain the lag.
The first is the regulatory environment. The National Futures Association's leverage caps and product restrictions have constrained the new-account product launches that have pushed MT5 adoption in other regions, with US retail clients limited to 50:1 on major FX pairs and shut out of CFDs entirely.
The second is that MetaQuotes' combined share kept growing in North America while shrinking elsewhere, which the analysis treats as a sign of slower migration rather than a structural ceiling.
Europe Is an xStation Story, Not a Platform Story
At the opposite extreme, xStation captured 92% of European platform traffic in Q1 2026, with 83% of all xStation visibility worldwide originating from European countries. Germany alone contributed 4 million xStation visits in the quarter, equivalent to 28% of the platform's global traffic from a single country.
The geographic distribution of xStation traffic almost perfectly mirrors XTB's broker footprint, FM Intelligence calculates, with the same 83% European concentration on both the platform and the broker side.
Among non-MetaQuotes, non-xStation platforms, cTrader registered the largest regional share in every region tracked, ranging from 2% in Europe to 7.5% in APAC.
The full analysis, including regional concentration data and scenario modelling for when North America's MT5/MT4 ratio could cross 1.0, is available at FM Intelligence DataLab.
The figures cited above measure web visibility to platform-branded domains and product pages across 121 countries from Q4 2024 through Q1 2026. They are FM Intelligence traffic measurements rather than reported trading volumes.
