Choosing a Forex Trading Platform

Nearly twenty years ago, there was only one trading platform: ‘The Phone’. Trading was not difficult. All you had to do was pick up the phone, call your broker and tell him what you would like to trade. Currencies, stocks, bonds and commodities; all the investment type trades were done through this approach. Fast forward two decades, and the scenario is different.

Brokers are still around, however the platform has changed – now the whole thing is done online through software called ‘trading platforms’. With a large number of brokers and alternatives available, it can be a difficult to find the right one.

There is a great variety of forex trading platforms and choosing the right one is quite difficult for beginners. However, you have to consider quite a few factors before diving into markets, mostly when you are a beginner. Let’s discuss about the options.

MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader5

MetaTrader is an electronic trading platform generally used by online retail foreign exchange traders. Built by MetaQuotes, a Russian company, back in the early 2000’s, the several versions of MetaTrader have made reliable followings among forex traders.

MetaTrader4 is the most popular trading platform in the industry right now for a couple of reasons. First, MT4 is powerful but comparatively easy to use, and there are thousands of YouTube videos presenting how to make use of it. Next, MT4 permits you to employ custom trading indicators and program to trade automatically, making it very popular among active traders and those looking for auto-trading signals.

As MetaTrader4 is surely a good platform to trade on and has an extremely large number of users, it is not without its problems. Basically, the infrastructure of MT4 platform itself is getting older – although MetaQuotes often updates the software, it is considering a decade old and the latest MetaTrader5 has yet to see extensive adoption among brokers.

MetaTrader is not supposed to be your best option if you never think of using automated trading. However, if you want a simple, flexible, handy trading platform with lots of useful indicators and trading tools accessible for free, MT4 is a better way to go.

C Trader

A latest competitor to the world of forex trading platforms is cTrader, another broker agnostic platform.  Although not almost as extensive as the MetaTrader platforms, cTrader is popular among more trendy traders mostly because it possesses faster execution times than MT4, has a professional and apparent interface, and because it shows what’s called ‘liquidity in second tier’.

In the MT4 platform only one price for a particular currency pair is displayed. That price is the best offered price for a selected pair. With second tier liquidity you can get not only the best offered price, but also the second and third available price. This ensures more simplicity into the marketplace and is effective when opening large orders.

C Trader is gaining steam in the forex industry and is certainly a solid platform, but it is only been accepted by a small number of brokers. If you are in search of a platform that provides a good selection of useful trading tools, multi-tiered liquidity, and fast execution, cTrader should obviously be a best choice for your forex trading platforms. If you are more concerned in automated trading, or if you don’t do technical analysis effectively while trading, cTrader is perhaps going to be overkill.

Now What?

So now you have it – a swift rundown of just a couple of the dozens of forex trading platforms out there. Now, whether you are a novice trader or an old professional, industry standard platforms like MT4 are always an excellent platform to trade. If you want more powerful and more sophisticated pricing, you may want to consider something like C Trader.