The first major broker to begin offering MetaQuote’s MetaTrader 5 trading platform in early 2012, Alpari is phasing out the platform. Currently only available to new accounts in demo form, Alpari announced that it will discontinue demo accounts on March 1st. The announcement affects the firm’s remaining RU (Alpari.ru) and Global (Alpari-Forex.com) brands after its UK group became insolvent following losses from Swiss franc volatility last month. Prior to the insolvency, MetaTrader 5 was being made available for real trading to clients with the UK regulated entity.

Explaing the decision, an Alpari representative answered to Forex Magnates that at the beginning of February, less than 1% of Alpari clients in Russia and the CIS had used the MT5 platform. As such, “Alpari made a decision to discontinue supporting of demo accounts effective March 1, 2015. It is important to highlight that no one of Alpari clients in Russia and the CIS used a real account on MT5 platform to date.”

Join the iFX EXPO Asia and discover your gateway to the Asian Markets

The decision to discontinue MetaTrader 5 is the latest blemish for the fledging platform. Being launched as the successor to the hugely popular MetaTrader 4 platform, MT5 has failed to gain much traction within the retail forex industry. Although MT5 provides server-side benefits such as a built-in bridge for external liquidity and the ability to operate multiple trader servers in one environment, it failed to attract end-user clients. Most notably this is the result of the platform’s automatic trading language being changed from that of MT4. This caused indicators and expert advisors that were programmed for MT4 to become unusable on MT5. However, to solve this problem, MetaQuotes has merged the languages of each platform to make them more uniform.