Trading Technology for Retail FX
The FX market offers many advantages to active traders – 24 hour trading, low transaction costs, the ability to earn interest on overnight positions, plus deep liquidity from a $5.3 trillion/day market. One of the most important advantages though is the abundance of top notch technology and trading platforms that are offered completely free to traders by FX brokers. FXCM, one of the largest FX brokers in the world, offers an array of free platforms and technology that allow for advanced system trading, an increasingly popular trend in FX trading. Additionally, FXCM now offers system developers the opportunity to sell and distribute their custom strategies on FXCMApps.com
MetaTrader 4 (MT4) is the most popular and widely used trading platform among retail forex traders. The popularity of MT4 is primarily due to the fact that it allows traders to customize the platform with their choice of coded strategies, called Expert Advisors, along with custom indicators. Expert Advisors (EA’s) are programmed in a relatively simple, C-like, proprietary programming language called MetaQuotes Language 4 (MQL4). EA’s can then be attached to any chart on MT4 to automate trading strategies.
Mirror Trader is a specialty trading platform that provides traders with hundreds of professionally developed trading strategies and signals to automate trades at their convenience. Mirror Trader is ideal for casual traders who don’t have the time or the resources to study the market for trading ideas, or who are interested in accessing a variety of ready-made, professionally developed and back-tested strategies. The platform offers hundreds of free strategies to perform over a wide range of market conditions and currency pairs.
A platform familiar to most futures traders, Ninja Trader, has quickly become a platform of choice for active forex traders for its advanced charting, market analytics, automated trading capabilities and trade simulation. FXCM has established a strategic partnership with NinjaTrader in order to offer FX traders free live trading access to the platform, with a minimal balance and trading requirement. Leading education providers use NinjaTrader for its unique order functionality, analytical tools, advanced charting and user-friendly interface. Signal and automated strategy developers can easily build systems and indicators compatible for NinjaTrader using C# based NinjaScript or use NinjaTrader to automate the execution of trading signals from via external applications via various interface options such a DLL, File, and .NET.
FXCM’s flagship Trading Station platform, used by some 90% of FXCM’s client base, is primarily designed for manual trading, but offers more than six hundred indicators, along with the ability to code custom indicators. The platform also allows for backtesting with powerful statistical data that includes visual representation of the trades on a chart and a balance and equity chart. Strategy Optimization is also offered, allowing for traders to optimize for maximum net equity, or lowest maximum drawdown, for example.
A new feature of the Trading Station platform is a Volume Indicator. Until now, other forex volume indicators have only shown tick volume, only part of the story with nothing about actual order flow. Now, FXCM's Real Volume/Transactions brings a pair of critical indicators to trader's charts, giving them a better trading advantage and can help better confirm price action. FXCM does over $15 billion in retail trading volume a day, on over 400,000 transactions. Providing a free indicator of this nature to sophisticated short term traders is truly a game changer in the retail FX space.
Since launching FXCM Apps in May of 2012, FXCM’s “app” store has released many exciting new add-ons, advanced indicators, and automated strategies for Trading Station, and MT4 and Ninja Trader. These apps have quickly gained popularity among traders who desire a customized trading experience. Many of the most popular applications are completely free and quick to download.
FXCM Apps also allows developers to sell and distribute their EAs, custom indicators, strategies and other applications in the app store, while keeping 80% of the revenue. FXCM handles the maintenance of the store and covers the cost of hosting and marketing the apps, so developers can focus on developing new products and growing their business. Developers who already have strategies coded for the futures market can also easily expand their client base through the App store by reaching traders outside of the United States who are active in the equities, metals and oil through FXCM’s CFD products.
For more information on establishing a partnership or IB relationship with FXCM, please contact Jacqueline Johnson at jjohnson@fxcm.com
FXCM is a leading global provider of foreign exchange (currency) trading and related services to retail and institutional customers. Founded in 1999, FXCM was the first forex broker to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: FXCM).
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in New York, NY, FXCM has operating subsidiaries regulated in a number of jurisdictions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Japan, and Australia. FXCM also maintains offices in Italy, France, Germany, and Greece.
At the heart of FXCM’s client offering is No Dealing Desk forex trading. Clients benefit from FXCM’s large network of forex liquidity providers enabling FXCM to offer competitive spreads on major currency pairs. Clients have the advantage of mobile trading, one-click order execution and trading from real-time charts. In addition, FXCM offers educational courses on forex trading and provides free news and market research through DailyFX.com.
