Choosing your platform for trading currencies online

When trading Forex, it is critical that you combine fundamentals with strong technical analyses. For technical analysis, you will need to use an advanced trading platform that can aid you in chart analysis and trading management. In today’s article, we are going to focus on trading platforms that will assist you in generating profits in Forex markets.

Trading platforms and how to choose the proper one

Forex trading platforms are diverse and numerous. We are going to focus on the most popular ones and their advantages. Most popular platforms include MetaTrader 4 and 5, TradingView, cTrader, etc. all of these platforms are powerful and equipped with cutting-edge technologies making it possible to analyze charts within seconds. They also support automated trading and custom indicators on top of the vast inbuilt indicators and automated solutions. MetaTrader 4 and cTrader are perhaps the oldest rivals in the trading platforms market. Readers who are interested can see cTrader compared to MetaQuotes software here with great details. 

Main metrics for choosing the platform

Here are things you will need the trading platform to do for you. 

• Its own programming language for custom indicators and automated trading software. Popular trading platforms like MetaTrader, cTrader and TradingView all come with programming languages to support robot building. Only cTrader uses c# which is the general language used widely. MT4 and TradingView on the other hand have their proprietary programming languages MQL4 and 5 for MT platforms, and pine script for TradingView.
• Growing community to share ideas and custom indicators and robots. TradingView is famous for allowing its users to share their trading ideas and build a follower base, by implementing these social elements the platform quickly gained popularity in recent years and currently has more than 30 million users worldwide.
• Advanced tools for analyzing charts like drawing tools and figures can be applied to charts to see price behavior cleaner. All popular trading platforms have vast tools and figures to draw on the chart and make easy-to-read price movements. Make sure your trading platform allows you to draw on the charts.
• Comfortable user-interface. TradingView has the most appealing visual appearance and customization features of the bunch. Night mode makes it much more comfortable for the eyes to stare at the screen in hopes of finding proper trading setups.
• Mobile trading experience. This can be crucial on the go. While almost all apps are limited on mobile devices, TradingView offers the best overall feature-rich package with the ability to use custom indicators and automated trading strategies. None of the platforms mentioned above except TradingView has this ability. Although all apps mentioned have inbuilt indicators and trading ability, TradingView doesn’t offer opening and closing trades at this point, but has paper trading available. It is important to analyze charts with indicators, and drawing tools, to manage trades on the go comfortably, so make sure your preferred platform comes with all these features.

TOP 3 Trading Platforms

Our picks for the top three trading platforms should be obvious at this point, so let’s not waste more time.

1. TradingView

TradingView is by far the most robust and multi-device charting and trading platform out there. The main pros and cons of TradingView are its ability to offer the same functionality on all platforms. Except, live trading is not available for mobile devices but offers desktop-level chart analysis on the go. Subscription-based models are not limited to a free version. The number of indicators on the chart and multi-window mode is limited for the free version. Users can find trading ideas for almost any popular trading instrument on TradingView’s website.

2. MetaTrader 4

MT4 is the most popular trading platform and it is completely free. It offers all features to its users except dark mode, but it comes with numerous visual customization options to appeal to its users. Custom indicators and Expert Advisors are among its strong sides. But its overall design from a user interface perspective is a bit old but functional.  MQL4 and 5 languages are offering users to write their own trading indicators and EAs making it possible to fully automate the trading process. MT4’s custom indicators and EAs are available on the marketplace. Many of these indicators and EAs are free and some are paid.

3. cTrader

Similar to MT4 as it offers all the benefits to its users. It uses c# as its programming language and also offers cBots as trading automation robots, but its community is not as large as MT4’s resulting in fewer robots and custom indicators. Other than that, traders offer almost the same capabilities. It has better social elements than MT4, but a lower number of custom indicators and robots makes it slightly inferior to MT4.

Key takeaways

When it comes to choosing the proper trading platform, there are several important aspects to take into account. Indicators and custom indicators, trading robots, and inbuilt social elements can become very important for new and pros alike. TradingView, MT4, and cTrader are the most popular trading platforms available today. All the platforms offer traders cutting-edge charting and analyzing tools. TradingView is one of the best charting and trading platforms available today, with MT4 and cTrader following in the 2nd and 3rd places. 

As all the above platforms offer similar capabilities for desktop users, and it all comes down to user preference rather than features. This is different for smartphone users, though, as they will have to use TradingView as their main analysis tool while using the MT4 and other mobile trading apps provided by their broker as trading tools.