MT5 ships with 38 built-in indicators. Most traders never need more than five of them. But there are a handful of free community indicators that genuinely add value if you understand what they do and what they do not.
Before installing anything, understand what MT5 already gives you. The 38 built-in indicators are organised into four groups: Trend, Oscillators, Volumes, and Bill Williams. The ones that earn their place on most charts:
| Built-in indicator | What it tells you | When it helps |
|---|---|---|
| Moving Average | Average price over N bars | Trend direction and dynamic support/resistance |
| Bollinger Bands | Price relative to its recent volatility envelope | Mean reversion setups and squeeze breakouts |
| ATR (Average True Range) | Average bar range over N bars | Position sizing and stop placement |
| RSI | Momentum oscillator 0 to 100 | Divergence detection and overbought/oversold context |
| MACD | Difference between two EMAs | Trend strength and momentum shifts |
| Volumes | Tick count per bar (not real volume on FX) | Activity proxy, useful on indices and metals |
If you are not getting value from these six, no third-party indicator will save you. The problem is not the toolset.
There are three sources for MT5 indicators outside the built-ins:
The list below is short on purpose. Most popular free indicators repackage the same idea with different colours. These are the ones that show information you cannot get easily from the built-ins.
Not technically an indicator, but a chart type that smooths candle noise. Each Heikin Ashi candle uses an average of the open, high, low and close from the current and previous bar. The result is a chart where trends look cleaner and choppy ranges look choppy.
Use case: filtering trend-following signals. If Heikin Ashi candles are consistently green with small lower wicks, the underlying trend is intact. When wicks start appearing on both sides, trend is weakening.
Limitation: the smoothed candles lag real price. Never use Heikin Ashi for entry timing or stop placement. The real price chart is the truth.
The built-in Volumes indicator shows tick count per bar. Volume Profile shows traded volume per price level over a session or range. It answers the question: at what prices did most of the activity happen?
Use case: identifying high-volume nodes (HVN) and low-volume nodes (LVN). Price tends to consolidate at HVNs and move quickly through LVNs. Strong support and resistance levels are usually high-volume nodes from previous sessions.
Free implementations on MQL5 Code Base: search "Volume Profile" and sort by rating. The ones with 4+ stars and 10k+ downloads are usually safe bets.
An indicator that draws coloured rectangles around Sydney, Tokyo, London, and New York sessions on your chart. Useful for traders who care about session opens, ranges, and overlaps.
Use case: visualising the Asia range before London opens, or marking the New York midnight open for ICT-style strategies.
Implementation note: most session indicators let you customise the times. Set them to UTC and remember that DST shifts London and New York by one hour twice a year.
Calculates relative strength of major currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CHF, AUD, CAD, NZD) by comparing performance across all crosses. The output is usually a sorted bar chart or rotating ranking.
Use case: pair selection. Instead of trading EURUSD because that is the chart you have open, you might notice that AUD is strongest and JPY is weakest, suggesting AUDJPY has a cleaner directional bias.
Caveat: currency strength meters lag and they aggregate across multiple timeframes. They are a context tool, not an entry tool.
Overlays candles from a higher timeframe directly on your current chart. For example, you can see daily candles drawn on a 1-hour chart without switching screens.
Use case: maintaining higher timeframe awareness during execution. If the daily candle is bearish and you are looking to long the 1-hour chart, you know you are fighting the higher trend.
The following categories of free indicators tend to disappoint:
| Category | Why it disappoints |
|---|---|
| "Non-repainting" arrow signal indicators | Either they repaint (the arrow appears on a closed bar but moves on the next tick) or they show signals that look great in the past but produce many false positives in real time. |
| "Holy grail" oscillator combos | Stacking RSI plus Stochastic plus MACD plus three custom oscillators does not produce a better signal. It produces a chart that is illegible during volatile moves. |
| Fibonacci auto-drawers | Algorithms cannot pick the right swing high and swing low. Fibonacci is a manual tool. Auto-drawers fight you constantly. |
| Harmonic pattern scanners | Pattern detection is rule-based and the rules are arbitrary. A "perfect" bat pattern fails as often as a poor one. |
| "AI predictor" indicators | Almost universally either curve-fitted to historical data or thinly disguised linear regression. Almost none survive walk-forward testing. |
A quick checklist that filters out 90% of the junk:
The process is the same for all custom indicators:
File → Open Data Folder. This opens the directory where MT5 stores all custom files for the current installation.MQL5/Indicators/. Drop the .mq5 or .ex5 file here.If you installed a .mq5 source file, MT5 compiles it automatically when MetaEditor opens. If there are compile errors, the indicator will not appear in Navigator and you will see errors in the Experts log tab.
If you took every paid indicator and every free indicator off your chart and used only price, moving averages, and ATR, your trading would not get worse. It might get better. The reason is that fewer inputs force you to actually look at price.
The traders who add indicators productively use them as filters, not as signals. The signal comes from price structure. The indicator confirms or disqualifies. If you flip that and let the indicator generate signals while price structure plays second fiddle, you will be on the wrong side of most breakouts and most reversals.
Often yes. The MQL5 Market has paid indicators that are sophisticated and well-supported, but most popular paid indicators are repackaged versions of ideas that exist freely. The price of an indicator is not correlated with its predictive value.
Verify rather than trust. Run the indicator on a chart, take a screenshot at bar close, refresh the chart or change timeframes, and compare. If signals from closed bars look different after the refresh, the indicator repaints.
If you cannot answer "what does this indicator tell me that I would not know otherwise" for each one on your chart, you have too many. Most consistent traders run 1 to 3 indicators per chart, often less.
Some indicators include gold-specific presets (e.g. ATR-based stops calibrated to typical XAU volatility), but no indicator is fundamentally different for gold than for any other instrument. Gold needs wider stops and larger position sizing tolerance, which is an account management issue, not an indicator issue.
Calendar indicators (NFP markers, FOMC vertical lines, holiday shading) are useful as visual reminders. They do not predict price reaction, but they help you avoid being surprised by a release.