MetaTrader 4 Standard Toolbar – Market Watch window

Written by Miroslav Marinov

Miroslav Marinov

Miroslav Marinov, a financial news editor at TradingPedia, is engaged with observing and reporting on the tendencies in the Foreign Exchange Market, as currently his focus is set on the major currencies of eight developed nations worldwide.

, | Updated: October 30, 2024

The symbols (trading instruments) for which the Client Terminal gets quotes from the server are presented in the “Market Watch” window. All the data are featured in this window in the form of a table, having several fields. The “Symbol” field contains the name of the instrument, the fields of “Bid”, “Ask”, and “Time” and shows the respective prices and time of their income from the server. Values in the “Maximum” and “Minimum” fields are calculated on the basis of daily price changes. The “Market Watch” window can be opened/closed by using the key combination of Ctrl+M, by using the “View Market Watch” menu command, or by pressing the button from the “Standard” toolbar.

This window allows one to place market and pending orders and open new charts. By clicking the right mouse button in the “Market Watch” window, one will see the context menu, where the following commands are listed:

– New Order – opens the “New Order” window, where one can prepare and place a market or a pending order for the instrument he/she selected. When preparing an order, one can specify the Stop Loss and Take Profit price levels. Further details are presented in the “Opening Positions” section. The “New Order” window can also be opened by a double-click on the name of the instrument in the “Market Watch” window, by using the “Tools – New Order” menu command, by using the “Terminal – Trade – New Order” window context menu command, by pressing the button from the “Standard” toolbar, or by pressing F9 of the keyboard.

– Chart Window – opens the chart of the instrument, that was selected. Further details about working with chart windows are presented in the “Working with Charts” section. The instrument chart can also be opened by using the “File – New Chart” and “Window – New Window” menu commands or by pressing the button from the “Standard” toolbar.

– Tick Chart – opens the tick chart of the instrument, that was selected. The tick chart is located directly in the “Market Watch” window. The tick chart of the selected instrument can also be viewed by switching to the tab of the same name in the same window. The tick data comes only when the account is connected. In case an account was not active for a certain period of time, the tick chart may appear empty in the beginning. The tick data is stored separately for each server.

– Hide – deletes (hides) an instrument from the list. In order to minimize the traffic, it is recommended to hide unused symbols from the quotes window by using this command or by pressing the Delete button of the keyboard. In case there is an open position or pending order for the instrument, or its chart is open, the instrument cannot be deleted.

– Hide All – deletes all symbols from the list. This command is not valid for instruments, for which there is an open position or the charts of which were opened in the current working session.

– Show All – shows the list of all available instruments. After one has executed this command, quotes for all these symbols will be viewed.

– Symbols – opens the window of the same name, where there is a list of all available symbols. Symbols are grouped in the window, based on their types. The “Show Symbol” command allows one to add necessary symbols to the quotes window. The “Hide Symbol” command deletes a symbol from the quotes window. The “Properties” window command allows one to see the symbol parameters.

– Sets – opens the sub-menu, managing the symbol sets. The current set of symbols can be stored in this sub-menu.

– High/Low – adds the highest and the lowest levels of the daily price to the quotes, that are displayed.

– Time – shows time of incoming quotes.

– Auto Arrange – automatically arranges columns when changing the window size. Auto Arrange can also be enabled by pressing the A button of the keyboard.

– Grid – shows/hides the grid, that separates columns. The grid can also be enabled by pressing the G button of the keyboard.

– Popup Prices – opens a window with additional quotes. One can also open this window by pressing F10 of the keyboard. The list of symbols in this window is the same as that in the “Market Watch” window at the moment when the command has been executed. Or, changes in the symbol list in the “Market Watch” window does not influence that in the “Popup Prices”. It is an information window, but trading operations can also be performed from it. To do so, one needs to double-click with the left mouse button on the desired symbol. In the context menu of this window, one will find commands, that allow setting up data displaying parameters, enabling the full screen mode, or placing the window over all others.