Forex

One of the biggest things that a forex trader will invest in is forex charting software.

This is essential for technical traders and a good charting package will go a long way towards making you a successful trader.Good and powerful charting software is essential for a technical trader. The data provided needs to be uncorrupted and consistent. Price spikes are not acceptable and neither are price gaps. One needs to find a simple to use charting program and these are some of the questions to ask yourself

* Does the charting package contain all the indicators that you require? - There is no reason to get packages with indicators which you cannot even spell or know what they do.
* Does the charting software have accurate historical data that is consistent and reliable?- It is not surprising to see a data provider with different data when you close and open your charts. The data needs to be reliable otherwise a winning strategy today is a losing strategy tomorrow.
* Does the software allow you to easily program your trading methodology or do you have to go and take another 6 month course in the programming language? - It is difficult enough to learn how to trade and having a software that requires you to buy a new book to learn how it works is time wasting.
* Can you afford it? - This is a very personal question and only you can answer it. It should be included in the cost of you doing your new forex business.
* Is the data provider for your charting program reliable or is the data influenced by other reasons like broker price manipulation?
* Is it easy to use?- Why get a package that you cannot understand or does not allow you to easily make it your own. Can the charts be resized easily, doesn't use too much of my computer resources etc.

Forex charting services come in two groups

1. Free charting services
2. Paid charting services

1. Free Forex Charting Services

Most free charting services are offered by forex brokers to their clients.Most forex brokers like forex.com, fxcm, gftforex, cmc forex and cms forex offer their own charting packages.

The recent trend has been new brokers offering the metatrader charting platform.Metatrader is very popular with new traders and as such the new brokers are using this to attract new forex traders.

However before one chooses a free forex charting package, one has to understand that there is an inherent flaw with using these charting packages.

By using the broker’s charting package, you are dependent on the broker’s data being accurate.

Unfortunately this is very unlikely and the most likely scenario is getting spikes on your charting package but none on other forex charting platform.A good exercise would be to compare the trading charting of two brokers with metatrader as their charting package. You will be very surprised.
As such anyone doing backtest with these charts is very likely going to find it very difficult looking for a good system that will continue earning in the future. It is no surprise that when you buy a system on metatrader it somehow never performs the same with a different broker or when you try and trade it live