In finance, an electronic trading platform also known as an online trading platform, is a computer software program that can be used to place orders for financial products over a network with a financial intermediary. In order to succeed, you need to look into many things and the first one is your trading platform. The trading platform should not be just a tool that helps you place orders, but it should be a way of making a difference to succeed. In order for this to happen it must fulfil some requirements that vary from trader to trader. These are the points which you should look about your trading platform

1. User Friendly platform

The trading platform must be user friendly, it should be intuitive and should be easy to understand and discover. It should be designed in such a way that allows you to find instantly whatever you need. You should be able to easily connect with it. It is practically impossible to create one fits all platform as every trader has different requirements. In order to overcome this and to maintain the possibility of having a platform you desire, you should make sure that it is fully customizable, so that you can create your own screen.

2. Platform with all the needed features (charts, indicators, etc)

FX trading usually is made on shorter timeframes compared to stock trading. It is more about momentum in FX trading.  It implies that you need to have decent knowledge of technical analysis. Most of the platforms have good or great TA sections, while some older ones may lack that. Your platform must be in such a way that it should allow you make technical analysis easy in efficient way. Plotting indicators, drawing trend lines, channels and even adding notes on the charts should be easy.

3. Easily skip between Tabs and Windows.

Main screen is small for all the information you need or for all the charts you will follow, hence you will need several windows and tabs. In order to avoid your precious time, the platform should allow you to easily skip through them. If you have used a platform in which information will be saved only on the main screen and used a different tab for technical analysis and all the charts prepared would be deleted when closing the platform. Make sure it’s doesn’t happen, as it is very disturbing and time consuming to do the same work over and over again.

4. Placing Conditional orders.

Conditional orders are an important tool if you master it. Stop loss, take profit, buy@, sell@, just to name a few, will help to create your strategy. They can be placed in advance in order to avoid changing your strategy because of emotions, to allow you to leave without missing trading opportunities. Consider a platform that has this facility at free of cost and easy to use.

5. Economic news feed

As rightly said Information is power. News makes and breaks. Currencies, as well as stocks and commodities, react strongly to news, so you always have to be up to date. The trading platform should provide you these details otherwise it will be hard for you. Imagine that the Federal Reserve Board makes a decision of you only find out the next day. Also the news feed should be real time news data as a delay in 5 minutes can also effect much.

6. Mobility

Mobility is the need of the day. You should be able to place trade from anywhere and anytime from your mobile phone. That’s the reason your trading platform should be fast, reliable and easy to use mobile application Among these, maybe the most notable are trading signals sent through e-mail or SMS, signals which are pre-set by you on the platform, given a set of conditions. These are required as you may not always have your trading platform open, but you should be aware of what happens on the trading floor. It would be better if it is free or at least cost bearable.

7. Indicator creator, scenario builder and back-testing platform

Each of us are different, so a one-fits-all approach may not be applicable. You are going to compete with computers; hence your strategy must be as close to perfection as possible. That’s the reason why you should be able to customise and innovate. Out of experience you may wish to create your own indicators and the platform must allow it. Also, you may want to implement your strategy: this means series of indicators, conditions, requirements, etc, that should happen before issuing a trading signal. These will increase chances of winning trades. Furthermore, You must be able to test indicators and strategies to see how they work on each individual FX pair and also how they fit you profile, so that you can decide accordingly.

8. Mutlilingual Interface

If the terminal interface is in your language it would make it easy for you to familiarize with the platform.  This feature makes the program not only easy-to-use, but also allows to reduce the number of errors that occur during trading because of lack of understanding of foreign terms and notions. Hence this feature could make your trading experience easy.