Native Spread Monitor

1. Drag the indicator onto any chart. A panel appears in the bottom-left corner (you can move it to another corner in the settings). No setup is required, it starts reading history immediately.

2. Look at the top section, "Right now". The Spread row is the live spread, in points and pips. Its colour is the whole point of this tool: green means the spread right now is at or below what this specific hour of the day usually costs, red means it is above what this hour's worst 10% normally looks like, and plain white means there is not yet enough history for this hour to judge it. The vs this hour row underneath spells that out as a percentile, "p87 of 1245 samples" means today's reading is higher than 87% of everything ever recorded for this exact hour.

3. The "This symbol" section below is the reference the colours above are judged against: Median (what you normally pay), p90 and p99 (how bad the worst 10% and worst 1% get), and a Worst-case blowout ratio, p99 divided by median. A blowout under 5x is unremarkable, 5-10x is worth noticing, over 10x means this symbol's tail is genuinely wide on this broker. If one hour of the day (typically broker rollover) behaves completely differently from the rest, it gets pulled out and shown on its own "Rollover hour" row instead of quietly skewing every number above it.

4. Cheapest hour and Costliest hour tell you, in one glance, when to avoid trading this symbol if your entries have any flexibility on timing. The small chart under "Last 24h" shows the same idea stretched over the last day: each bar's height is where that hour sits between the day's calmest and roughest reading, and its colour is judged against that hour's own history the same way the live Spread row is.

5. Two things are off by default because they need a number from you first. Open the indicator's Inputs tab: set Typical lot size to the size you actually trade, and two new rows appear translating the spread into your account currency, "0.03 USD" instead of "3 points". Turn on Alert on expensive spread and the indicator will pop up a native MT5 alert (and push notification, if configured) the moment the live spread crosses that hour's own 90th percentile, so you do not have to watch the panel.

6. Everything else in the settings is cosmetic: theme (Auto follows your chart's own colours), panel corner, how many days of history to scan, and whether to also show a full 24-row hour-by-hour table.

• Works on any chart timeframe: the spread profile itself is always built from 1-minute history regardless of the chart, for the largest sample count the broker's feed allows
• No special account type or broker feature required
• Needs at least 20 usable spread samples in the lookback window, and genuine coverage across those samples, to build a profile; a feed with too little real spread data shows n/d instead of a guess

Four free tools that surface data MetaTrader 5 already has but does not show:

• Native Session Volume  — volume split by trading session
• Native Spread Monitor  — the spread you actually pay, hour by hour
• Native Depth Viewer    — the order book, on the chart
• Native Account Stats   — your closed trades, by symbol, hour and weekday

FAQ

I switched the panel to Light and it goes back to Dark after a few seconds?

Almost always two copies of the indicator on the same chart. Both write the exact same object names, so they overwrite each other on every redraw (default: every 5 seconds)