ArenaFX becomes latest Japanese broker to terminate MT4 offering

The Japanese Forex industry is famous for its conservatism and domestic focus. That is why it is rarely surprising when Japanese FX brokers put an end to a service that is not originally Japanese.

Retail FX broker Arena-FX Co., Ltd, aka ArenaFX, has become the latest Japanese Forex company to stop offering the MetaTrader 4 (MT4) platform to its clients.

The company attributes the move to “Forex restructuring” and sets September 30, 2017, as the deadline for closing all positions on the platform. Withdrawal requests will be accepted by October 9, 2017.

ArenaFX has been offering MT4 trading to its clients since early 2013. The decision to terminate the MT4 offering will affect both live and demo accounts. The company has already stopped accepting applications for new MT4 accounts.

Several Japanese Forex brokers, including Japan’s retail FX giant Monex Group, Inc. (TYO:8698) and YJFX, a subsidiary of Yahoo Japan Corporation (TYO:4689), have stopped offering MetaTrader 4 earlier. YJFX said back in the fall of 2014, when it announced its plans to terminate the offer of MT4, that its decision was sudden and gave no specific reasons for the move. After abandoning MT4 in the autumn of 2014, Monex focused on the development of its proprietary platform TradeStation.

MT4 is still on the menu of a number of Forex brokers operating in Japan, including the Japanese subsidiary of OANDA, as well as Forex.com Japan, a subsidiary of Gain Capital Holdings Inc (NYSE:GCAP). Speaking of which, let’s recall that Forex.com Japan is about to change some of the MT4 servers. The upgrade is scheduled for August 12, 2017.

Meanwhile, as industry executives have reiterated numerous times in interviews with FinanceFeeds, another of the MetaQuotes-developed platforms, MetaTrader 5 (MT5) is gaining growing popularity. It will be interesting to see whether Japanese brokers will adopt MT5 in place of MT4.