XM offers both MT4 and MT5 platforms, however, we see they prefer the newer version, but due to the popularity of MT4 – which still rules the trading world, they support both platforms. XM will write they have 16 platforms, but in our view, there are the two we mentioned. The difference is that XM sees iPhone MT4 version as a separate platform, while we don’t. In any case, it’s just semantics. If you are an experienced trader, you will know what you are getting, if you are beginner, try them out through a demo.
There is one significant difference between MT4 and MT5 with XM – the MT4 cannot trade stock CFDs, so if you got your eye on that Apple stock to speculate on, make sure to choose MT5 since you won’t find it on MT4. We won’t go into all the other differences between the new version of the MetaTrader, and the old, we are pretty sure this much debated topic won’t get a definitve conclusion soon. In any case, XM also directly offers download for MT4 and MT5 for Mac computers, which we don’t see with many brokers unfortunately. With one broker, we even got instructions how to install a Windows environment software to our Mac and then install Windows MT4 into the environment – the type of unnecessary complications you will not encounter here.
XM Assets
Moving on to the underlying asset classes – there are seven with XM forex and they include Forex pairs/currencies, stocks, commodities, precious metals, energies, equity indices and cryptocurrencies. While we would consider metals and commodities one and the same, the sheer importance of Gold or Silver in global markets is reason enough to keep them separate. In total XM claims over 300 assets from these 7 categories.
XM – Trading Cryptocurrencies
CFDs can also be used to trade cryptocurrencies, however, these instruemnts are not covered by the EU regulatory framework. Good thing about trading cryptocurrencies with CFDs is that you do not have to own a wallet and can directly use your trading account. Spreads with XM are tight and they offer Bitcoin/USD, Dash/USD, Ethereum/USD, Litecoin/USD and Ripple/USD, at the moment and its on their MT5 platform. If you want a wider selection of cryptocurrencies, maybe you should try AvaTrade or 24option which offer several cryptos as underlying assets.