The market watch is the most-used panel in MT5 and the most misunderstood. Plus DOM: when it is real Level II liquidity, when it is just last-tick movement, and how to tell the difference.
The market watch is the panel on the left side of MT5 by default. It lists every symbol your broker offers and your subscribed quotes for each. It also serves as the launching point for charts, one-click trading, and the DOM window.
Each row shows, by default:
EURUSD, XAUUSD, US500).Right-click the column headers to add more: high/low, time, change, volume, and several others. The most useful additional columns are Time (timestamp of the last tick) and High/Low (today's range).
By default, MT5 only streams ticks for symbols actually visible in your market watch. This is a deliberate bandwidth optimisation. If you open a chart of USDJPY but USDJPY is not in your market watch, MT5 quietly adds it.
To remove symbols you do not need: right-click them and choose Hide. Bandwidth and CPU drop.
To show every symbol the broker offers, right-click anywhere in the market watch and choose Show All. Be warned: on brokers offering 1,500+ symbols this can slow MT5 noticeably.
Ctrl+U or right-click then choose Symbols. This opens the full symbol browser organised by category (Forex, Indices, Commodities, etc.), with full contract specifications for each.For any symbol, right-click and choose Specification. You get a dense table that tells you everything about how that instrument trades on your broker. Critical fields:
| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
| Contract size | How much one lot represents. EURUSD = 100,000 EUR. XAUUSD = 100 troy ounces. |
| Tick size | Smallest price increment. EURUSD = 0.00001 (5-digit pricing). |
| Tick value | P/L per 1.0 lot per tick. For EURUSD typically about 1 USD. |
| Margin initial | Margin required to open one lot. Drives your max position size. |
| Margin currency | Currency the margin is calculated in. Important on multi-currency accounts. |
| Profit currency | Currency in which P/L is settled. |
| Swap long / short | Overnight rollover cost or credit, in points per lot. |
| Filling policy | How orders fill: Fill or Kill, Immediate or Cancel, Return. Different brokers default to different modes. |
| Execution | Instant, Market, Exchange, or Request. The actual order execution model. |
Always check the specification before trading a new symbol. Contract sizes vary wildly between brokers, particularly for indices and metals.
Press Alt+B with a symbol selected, or right-click and choose Depth of Market. A floating window opens showing buy and sell orders at different price levels.
What you see depends entirely on what your broker's server sends.
On ECN and DMA brokers (think Tier-1 institutional setups), MT5 DOM shows aggregated Level II from all connected liquidity providers. You see:
This is genuinely useful information for execution. You can see whether there is enough liquidity at your limit price, identify where stops might be clustered, and time entries to avoid getting filled in a thin level.
On most B-book retail brokers, MT5 DOM shows synthesised data derived from recent ticks. The broker fills in plausible levels above and below to make the panel look populated. This is not lying exactly, since the broker will honour those prices for retail-sized fills, but it is not real LP liquidity.
Some brokers disable DOM entirely for certain symbols (often CFDs on indices and crypto). The window opens empty or shows only the current bid/ask.
Quick tests, in order of effort:
You can place limit orders by clicking levels in the DOM window. This is useful for:
To place a limit from DOM:
Alt+B).Your order appears on the DOM as a horizontal line at your price level.
The market watch shows the latest tick only. If you want to see the recent tick history, right-click a symbol and choose Tick Chart. This opens a real-time tick-by-tick view, useful for confirming whether the market is genuinely active or has stalled.
The tick chart updates as ticks arrive from the broker server. It shows actual bid and ask traces, with bid as the blue line and ask as the red line by default (you can customise colours).
Right-click any column header. The columns I always enable:
Right-click anywhere then choose Sets, then Save As. Saves your current visible symbols, column choices, and ordering as a named set. You can have one set for "morning Asia symbols", another for "London FX", another for "US indices".
Click column headers to sort by spread, by change, by alphabet. To group symbols by category, right-click and choose Show Categories. Useful when working with broker offerings of 500+ instruments.
Greyed-out symbols are subscribed but not currently quoting. This usually means the market is closed for that instrument. US stock CFDs go grey outside US session hours, for example.
Yes, by clicking price levels and placing limit orders. You cannot send orders directly to the LPs - everything still routes through your broker server. But on a real-DOM broker, your limit price corresponds to actual LP liquidity.
Three common reasons: (1) market closure or low-liquidity session, (2) the symbol is exotic or has thin LP coverage, (3) news has just hit and LPs have temporarily widened. Watch the time column to confirm ticks are still arriving.
Bid is the highest price someone is currently willing to buy at. Ask is the lowest price someone is currently willing to sell at. You sell to the bid and buy from the ask. The difference (spread) is the cost of round-tripping a position instantly.