Best Moving Average Settings for MT4 by Timeframe (2026)

The best moving average settings for MT4 on EURUSD depend far more on the period than on the method: across eight tested configurations the period spread results by 9 percentage points while EMA against SMA moved them by under 2. On the 5-minute chart only EMA 50 and 200 finished profitable, at 51.1% and +2.31 pips per trade.

What do the four MT4 fields actually control?

What settings should you use by timeframe?

These come from measurement on EURUSD, not from convention. The M5 row is directly tested in my crossover test; the slower rows follow the same logic of using enough bars for the average to mean something.

How do you set this up in MT4 and MT5?

1. Open the chart, then Insert, Indicators, Trend, Moving Average. The path is identical in MT5, and the general routine is in my guide to adding indicators to MT5.
2. Set Period to 50, MA Method to Exponential, Apply to to Close, Shift to 0. Give it a colour you can read.
3. Repeat for Period 200 in a second, dimmer colour. You now have the pair.
4. Right click the chart, Template, Save Template, and name it. Applying it to a new chart is then one click instead of eight fields.
5. If the indicator does not appear at all, the install path is usually the cause and my MT4 install guide walks through it.

Which settings should you avoid?

• 9/21 and 12/26 on M5. Both lost money in my test, between 0.26 and 1.11 pips per trade, and they trade four times more often than 50/200.
• Any positive Shift. It moves the line, not the information.
• Apply to Median or Typical unless you have a specific reason. Every published result, including mine, uses Close, so anything else makes your chart incomparable to everyone else’s.
• Three or four averages at once. They are all measuring the same thing at different lags, which is not confluence.

Should you add a filter on top?

Not another moving average. In my crossover test, filtering EMA 12/26 signals by an EMA 200 trend filter made results worse, dropping the win rate from 44.6% to 41.2%. A crossover is already a trend signal, so filtering it by trend removes the early entries where its edge lives. That is the opposite of what happens with an oscillator: filtering Stochastic signals by the same 200 average turned a losing setup positive, because an oscillator has no view on direction and the filter gave it one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best moving average setting for a 5-minute chart?

EMA 50 and 200. It was the only pair of eight that finished profitable on 16,926 EURUSD 5-minute bars: 51.1% win rate, +2.31 pips per trade over 88 signals.

Is the 200 EMA useful on its own?

As a direction filter for oscillator setups, yes, and measurably so. As an entry trigger by itself, no. It tells you which side of the market you are on, which is a different job from telling you when to act.

What does the Shift setting do?

It moves the drawn line forward or backward in time without changing any calculation. A positive shift can make a backtest look predictive when it is not. Leave it at zero.

Should Apply to ever be changed from Close?

Rarely, and only if you are deliberately reproducing a published method that used something else. Otherwise it silently makes your results incomparable with every other result you read, including the numbers on this site.

How many moving averages should be on a chart?

Two, and only if you are trading their relationship. Three or more are three views of the same underlying number at different lags, and stacking them creates the feeling of confirmation without the substance. The same trap appears with Stochastic and RSI together, which agreed on the same bar only 149 times out of thousands.