Forex Trading Platforms

What is a Forex Trading Platform?

A Forex trading platform is a special software that monitors the Forex market, places and manages orders and overall maintains a trading account. Basically, it is a mean of communication between a broker and a trader, and an access point to the Forex itself.

All popular Forex trading platforms are free, however, some are proprietary to a certain broker. We advise beginners to start with a more generic and widely supported platform – then they will have transferable skills and will be able to trade with any existing platform.

How Do Forex Trading Platforms Work?

Forex trading platforms bring the whole exchange to your pocket, allowing you to trade while doing your own thing. Here’s a short list of what you can do with of them.

• Trade on Forex;
• Manage your accounts;
• Analyze market tendencies;
• Receive the latest Forex news and real-time signals;

In shorthand, Forex trading platforms make you a part of the Forex market without the need of going to the exchange physically. That’s why everyone uses them nowadays – from newbies to hardened professional traders and dedicated market analysts.

How to Pick a Trading Platform?

If you don’t know with which Forex platform to start – here’s a nifty list to check.

• Check with your broker. The most important part. Some brokers simply can not support some trading platform – for example, because they are incompatible with their infrastructure. For example, JustMarkets supports MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 trading platforms.
• Read the reviews. The review system can be blatantly manipulated, but for the most part, they are quite trustworthy. Read the negative reviews first, since they are usually the most truthful – even if opinionated.
• Engage the community. Most trading platforms have an official community of sorts – a corporate forum, a creator’s blog or maybe even a social media page. At the very least, you should skim this community and try to see how it is satisfied with the platform.
• Look at the tutorials. Most trading platforms are highly utilitarian and still use archaic Windows 95-style interface. It works great, but might be somewhat scary to the beginners. However, there are good tutorials on Youtube, that explain how to work with most trading platforms.

Just remember – at the end of the day, all Forex trading platforms are good. While some of them have more intuitive UI or enjoy wider community support, all of them still do the same job. As long as your broker supports your platform, you are good to go.

MetaTrader 4 – the Best Trading Platform for Beginners

The most popular Forex trading platform for beginners is MetaTrader 4. It provides everything you need for comfortable trading and scales really well with the custom indicators, scripts and expert advisers.

MetaTrader 4 is supported by the majority of brokers – even those with the proprietary systems tend to offer the MT4 support as a fallback. It’s tried, true and beloved by the community, which creates new advisors, scripts and indicators even 13 years after the initial release. And you don’t even have to be a professional software developer to create your own add-on – the MQL scripting language is quite approachable.

At the moment, MetaTrader 4 is best enjoyed on PC. MetaQuotes also makes an Android version, and there is an iOS port of it for the Apple devices. There is also a Web version, although it does not have all the features. Linux and MacOS are supported officially via Wine. However, Wine brings some limitations – like a missing internal add-on Market.

MetaTrader 4 is free and available for download on MetaQuote’s official website.

MetaTrader 5 – new opportunities for traders!

The trading platform offers new advanced features for professional traders.

This terminal provides 38 technical indicators and 44 graphical objects for making the analysis. Also, you may use 21 timeframes instead of standard 9 in MT4. By default, the toolbar contains only the main timeframes. By calling the context menu, you can add the timeframes you need to the toolbar.

The terminal contains several dozens of built-in indicators developed by professional traders. At the same time, you can install an unlimited number of technical indicators on one chart. The difference from the MT4 trading terminal is that in the MT5 trading platform you can impose one indicator on another, receiving more smoothed indicator data.

These and much more features are available in the MetaTrader 5 trading terminal.