currency trading ireland

Forex Trading Platforms - Are You Sure That You Have The Right One?
By Matthew Johnson
One of the important steps in strating forex trading is installing various forex trading platforms and see which one is the best. If you are planning to use automated trading system, this step is still important since your system still need a tool to connect to the market.


A trading platform is a tool that used by the trader to access forex market and do various other things such as execute orders, analyzing charts, view live price, etc. The other features ranged widely depend on the creator and the purpose; some of them are built solely for certain market, the other cover forex, futures, and CFD markets.

Usually, forex trading platforms are given free by the brokers when you use their services. This can be in software form that you must install in your computer or an online platform. These days, these broker's trading platform has quite complete features; at the very least they are all support basic charting which is the bread and butter of forex market analysis.

Due to various circumtances, you can't always use trading platform from your broker; for instance: if you utilize Expert Advisor (EA) or forex robot, you must have it run under Meta Trader 4 (MT4), a popular trading platform.

So, what do you need from these forex trading platforms? These are some things that a platform should have:

1. Easy access to your account information as well as orders summary. One of the important feature is it must display real time value of your account by calculating current price and your open positions. Example: if you close your position at the current price, your account will get profit/loss by 20 pips.

2. User friendly interface to get to your preferable currency pair. It must provide you with real time accurate updates on the market movement and live chart to support your analysis.

3. Easy to execute orders. When the market has hit the right price, you don't have time to clicking various button and link across the screen just to make an entry. The means to execute order has to be accessible by various ways.

4. Quick and accurate to execute order. These are problems that experienced by many traders that use various low quality forex trading platforms. Usually, the problem is the trading platform won't execute the order that you have given; it will display the ‘waiting' status while the market price keep moving and make you lose potential profits.

This problem can be caused by connection issues which sometimes also experienced by a good broker, but it can also caused by something worse: you are using scam brokers trading platform. These brokers are designing their forex trading platforms so it will make it hard for you to have a winning trade or proper risk management. There are times when it won't execute your stop loss order and when you try to confirm it you will only get excuses. If you have experienced this again and again, just withdraw your account and find another broker.

Aside from scam brokerage, there are still many credible forex trading platforms that owned by honest forex brokers; just go with a recommended broker and you will be fine. The interface of the platforms might different for each broker, but as long as it is fulfill the four requirements that I've mentioned above, it should serve you well.
As a trader, Matthew Johnson has tested various trading platforms. Read his finding about a broker that provide the world leading trading platform for free at 4XP Review; read the truth about the owner of these trading platforms at online forex broker.