What is the best platform to start trading (or following) forex with?

Hello all,

Care to share what in your opinion is the best platform to start trading (or following) forex with? Which one has the most user-friendly demo and then profitable results to continue live?

Mine trading experience limits to zulutrade, but maybe we can enrich each other with examples and comments.

thanks in advance.

I prefer to AVAFX forex broker for both demo and real account and software are zulutrade & MT4.

I use FXCM for my live account and the trade station is quite user friendly and easy to learn.
But i also use MT4 for charting software, its a popular choice and works well.

I guess the most popular platform now a days is MT4 or metatrader4, a lot of brokers use this platform, very easy to read and understand, just give it some time, later on I’m pretty sure you will try and check other platforms not necessarily on a computer, there are blackberry platforms, iphone, ipad… etc Or what I do like a place my order with hotforex on MT4 then check the charts later on my phone on a totally non hotforex app LOL! but thats what works for me and you will definitely find what works for you and all the best :slight_smile:

thank you all guys for the nice responses, but I was hoping for more answers along the lines of platforms that offer mirror trading (this type of forex autotrading) or simply for the loosers like me that know little about manual trading to manage to gain something :wink:

If the big money could be made in ways as easy as you are suggesting, don’t you think everyone would be doing it…

Hard work, good education and experience will reward you in the long term…

Hi Dima,

I think you got mixed up with the terminology a bit. :slight_smile:

A ‘[I]platform[/I]’ is just a piece of software, enabling you to open/modify/close positions with the broker of your choice.

If you’re looking for a good broker, have a look at the many threads dealing with broker search on this forum.

While various brokers offer mirror trading facilities, I’d advise you to nevertheless educate yourself about trading first … it’s not good to rely on somebody else to make money for you, and you must be able to understand trading to make a proper choice of who to mirror anyway.

Cheers,
O.

I have found MT4 on FXCM to be very user friendly - I’m using it as a demo platform quite happily.

thanks O., for the kind remarks but I was thinking along the ways of a platform offering different brokers to choose from along with trading signals of different rank and profitability. For some reason I find it easier to follow (since I also have another full time job) and totally no time to engage myself in learning and trading manually. Not that I do not wish for, sure, but for me college time is over. Now is the family and career to follow. Though, some extra cash on the side I find quite thrilling, as far as it is secure (meaning regulated) and fast executioned (not waiting for the Q1 to pass to collect interests). These are my thoughts of course, discussion is on the floor and welcomed.

I use the MT4 platform. My broker provides free chart patterns which are provided through a plugin specifically for the platform – works really well. And it’s free! :slight_smile:

you can shortlist your choice of candidates according to your preliminary research.

it’s very important to choose a right broker for yourself, I’d not done enough research jors when i started trading forex, that’s why I changed several live accounts on different broker later. I finally chosen hotforex as my existing one and I’m satified with their platform and the service.

Thank you for the promotion taohai,
but lets not get off topic here…I am sure we all have chosen our brokers…pretty doubtful I will prefer an Asian broker, since I am from Europe. Regardless, so you are manually trading Mt4 or you hold a PAMM account?

In that case, you are really talking about investing rather than trading, so why limit yourself to Forex? Many of the investment houses offering a decent set of results are not deriving those results solely from Forex trading. Forex is a very volatile market, so personally I prefer to trade it myself or not at all. If you are looking to invest money with someone else in order that they can give you a return, then I would look at a more generalist package of investments, personally. As this is a trading site, primarily aimed at active traders, even if you do wish to stick with Forex then I don’t think that there is a great deal of expertise in depth on here on this aspect of Forex, or if there is then it is certainly not discussed much.

I would decide, though, whether you wish to trade for yourself or invest with someone else and hope for a return. It seems to me that wanting signals from someone else which you then follow is a sort of halfway house that is not ideal as either a trading career (you aren’t trading, and won’t really understand the nuances of the trades you are in) or an investment (by placing yourself in the equation you slow the whole process down and make it less flat-footed).

This is all just my opinion, but personally I would either learn to trade or go to an established in investment house and discuss options with them.

ST

This site is great,I have been trading with a demo account for a month and a half and I`m up 20 grand, started with 100 grand .This seems a little to easy, I was wondering if there was a way to bolster the trades to make you think that you are doing better than you really are, so as to suck you into opening a real account.The broker the I started with is Oanda I am trading out of Canada. Wondering if anyone has any info on them.

I think that part of it is that as demo trading is consequence-free, it is easy to click the button to enter a trade, and should one have a losing trade or two it is easy to find the steel to get back in and enter new trades, so demo makes it easier to trade mechanically.

Your own example throws up a good example of this: had this been live trading, would you have taken all the same trades had it been a real $100,000 you were trading with? Easy to be brave with monopoly money!

Demo is great for learning one the technicals of how to trade, but does not replicate the psychology of live trading. Most newer traders, when they take a couple of live losses, carry forward some small impact on their next few trades.

So I don’t think that demo trading is rigged as such, but as it does not contain a psychological element, to speak of, it does not replicate everything that is going on when trading for real.

Also, I would strongly recommend demo trading with an amount equal to that which you would have available when switching to live trading. Why pick $100,000 as your demo amount? You can learn all the same lessons with $1500, say, and have it much more representative of your eventual progression into live trading, which must help the learning. It might be exciting to trade demo with such a large sum, but it is just like playing monopoly or something, and is not as relevant a lesson for your transition to live (unless you intend to go live with $100,000, apologies for assuming no lol).

Personally I am not a fan of demo, but if you are then my advice would be at least to ensure that your demo practice is as close as possible to replicating your eventual live trading.

At the moment, it is a bit like learning to drive. You intend to buy a regular car when you pass your test, but are learning to drive on a Pagani Zonda computer game. You might be learning the basic controls, road layout etc, but it is so vastly different from the real thing that it is likely that your performance will take a backward step when you venture out onto the roads for real.

20% return in six weeks is good, but hitting that return live trading at the outset is much harder, imho.

ST

Zulutrade and only zulutrade is my answer.
Read our threads to get more informed :wink:

Yes if it seems a little too easy, then i think you will find its a lot more difficult live. We would all like to think we have good risk tolerance and can be detached from our money, but it takes some practise thats for sure.

I am trading MT4, and currently is learning to use EA now.

If you google it you’ll find several dealers that offer mirror trading. Just make sure that they’re NFA registered and well capitalized.
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you could have not said it better:) I am also adding to that - to not have anything pending as well.