OANDA Japan is less than three weeks away from blocking new orders on MetaTrader 4 as the broker moves toward a complete shutdown of the legacy trading platform in November.
The broker’s latest notice, published Sept. 4, confirms that new MT4 orders will be disabled after trading ends on Friday, Sept. 25. When markets reopen on Monday, Sept. 28, customers will only be able to close positions they already hold.
That close-only period will last for roughly two months.
OANDA will terminate MT4 entirely after trading ends on Nov. 27, at which point clients will no longer be able to log in to the platform or place any type of MT4 transaction. The shutdown applies to both live and demo accounts.
For customers using OANDA’s Tokyo MT4 server, positions and balances still remaining when the platform closes will be transferred by the broker to an MT5 Standard Plan account over the weekend of Nov. 28-29.
OANDA said it will provide more detailed information about the position-transfer process closer to the shutdown. Clients without open positions but with cash still sitting in Tokyo-server MT4 accounts have been encouraged to move those balances to MT5, fxTrade or TradingView accounts before the deadline.
The situation is slightly different for customers accessing MT4 through OANDA’s New York server.
They will also lose access to MT4 after Nov. 27, but OANDA says those customers can continue trading the underlying accounts using the broker’s fxTrade platform or through TradingView. The company is encouraging users to test those interfaces and check their positions before MT4 disappears.
OANDA first announced its plan to retire MT4 earlier this year.
New Tokyo-server MT4 subaccounts stopped being available on March 27, effectively closing the platform to expansion months before existing users were required to leave. The broker subsequently shut its browser-based MT4 and MT5 web terminals at the end of May, while continuing to support desktop and mobile versions of the platforms.
The Sept. 25 restriction therefore marks a more significant stage of the migration. Existing MT4 users will still have access to their accounts, but the platform will cease functioning as a venue for opening new trades.
OANDA attributes the retirement largely to security requirements.
The broker said MT4 has been available for a long period and that MetaQuotes, the platform’s developer, no longer includes it within its system-maintenance scope. OANDA said that makes it increasingly difficult to keep the platform aligned with current cybersecurity requirements and to maintain the level of protection it wants for customer assets and personal information.
The statement is OANDA’s characterization of MT4’s maintenance status. The broker is using it as one reason to push customers toward MetaTrader 5, which it describes as faster and more capable, with additional chart timeframes and improved strategy-testing functionality.
The MT4 retirement is also part of a wider security overhaul at OANDA Japan.
The company introduced passkey authentication for its account portal, mobile application, fxTrade and TradingView access in June and plans to require stronger authentication for MT5 using MetaTrader’s Extended Authorization functionality. OANDA has linked those measures to rising phishing and unauthorized-access risks.
That reflects a broader push across Japan’s financial sector.
Japan’s Financial Services Agency has been pressing securities companies to strengthen authentication following a surge in account takeovers and unauthorized trades. The regulator has specifically encouraged the adoption of phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication such as passkeys and has amended supervisory guidance around online account security.
OANDA’s MT4 customers now face two separate deadlines: Sept. 25 for opening new positions and Nov. 27 for using MT4 at all.
For traders who have not yet migrated strategies, indicators or trading routines, the first of those dates may prove to be the more important one.
The Real Migration Risk Starts Before MT4 Shuts Down
It would be easy to treat Nov. 27 as the important date because that is when MT4 technically disappears.
Operationally, Sept. 25 matters more.
Once an account becomes close-only, an MT4 trader can no longer postpone the decision about where future trades will be placed. They either move to MT5, use another OANDA interface or stop initiating new trades through OANDA.
That creates a natural migration test before the final shutdown.
Manual traders may find the move relatively straightforward. MT5 still looks and behaves enough like MetaTrader that many basic workflows will be familiar.
The situation becomes more complicated for clients who built their trading process around MT4-specific software.
MetaTrader’s biggest strength has always been the ecosystem around it: Expert Advisors, custom indicators, scripts and personalized setups. MT4 and MT5 use different programming environments, and an Expert Advisor written for MT4 does not generally run natively on MT5 without being adapted or converted. MetaQuotes’ own developer community has long documented the differences between MQL4 and MQL5.
That means changing the platform can be more than learning where the order button moved.
For an automated trader, it can mean rebuilding or testing code, confirming order behaviour and verifying that a strategy produces the same results in a different environment.
That is also why OANDA’s decision to leave almost two months between the new-order cutoff and the final shutdown makes sense.
The broker gets a period in which customers can still access their legacy accounts and manage existing exposure, but they cannot continue adding new MT4 positions indefinitely. It effectively forces migration while leaving an escape route for closing old trades.
The automatic transfer of Tokyo-server positions introduces another issue.
Moving an open position from one trading platform to another is fundamentally different from asking a customer to download new software. Account balances, open positions and the customer’s ability to manage risk all have to remain consistent during the transition.
OANDA has not yet published the detailed mechanics of the Nov. 28-29 transfer, saying those will come closer to the shutdown.
That is the part worth watching.
Clients will want to know how stop-loss and take-profit instructions are treated, what happens to pending orders, how position identifiers appear after migration and whether any platform-specific trading logic attached to MT4 positions survives the move.
None of that means problems are expected. But forced platform migrations create more operational complexity than voluntary upgrades.
There is also a wider industry implication.
MT4 remains deeply embedded in retail FX despite being a legacy platform. Brokers have spent years encouraging customers toward MT5, yet the persistence of MT4 demonstrates how difficult it is to move traders once their strategies, tools and habits become attached to a particular system.
Cybersecurity requirements may now provide brokers with a stronger reason to accelerate that transition.
OANDA Japan is making that argument explicitly: maintaining an older platform is no longer simply a product choice if the broker believes it cannot meet modern security standards.
The first meaningful test will arrive on Sept. 28, when existing MT4 customers open the platform and discover they can close trades but cannot open another one.
By then, migration will no longer be a future deadline. It will be part of the daily trading workflow.