Broker to Trading

The Advanced Trading Platform is FOREX.com's flagship online trading platform. It offers all of Forex.com's 300+ markets to trade (including 90+ Forex pairs). FOREX.com also provides MT4 (supporting both automated and non-automated trading) and a user friendly web trader for the trader who executes their own trades.

What is a standout feature of FOREX.com's Advanced Trading Platform ?

For this reviewer it is its charts. Charting analysis is at the core of market analysis. It is the representation by which the trader gets to analyse the movement of value of markets. The Advanced Trading Platform's charts are visually very clear and tailored the the needs of traders.

In terms of usability the Advanced Trading Platform is not hard to use though it may not be on a par with some of the more expressly intuitive trading platforms in terms of immediate user friendliness (for example Plus500's platform). However its powerful features and range of tools may make it worthwhile to make an effort to learn how to use it. This said, the platform can be said to be relatively user friendly when compared with other trading platforms and it has been refined over the years. FOREX.com also offers its Web Trader platform, which is designed to be user friendly.

When placing a trade the trader chooses a market to trade. They can do this on the Advanced Trading Platform via the Markets Search Box. Clicking on the icon to the left of the search box brings up all available markets grouped into categories such as Forex, Stocks and so on. The full list of available markets to trade, in terms of categories is: Forex, Indices, Metals, Energy, Soft Commodities, Equities, ETFs and Cryptocurrencies for a total of 300+. As might be expected, FOREX.com has a relatively wide range of Forex pairs to trade, with 90+.

FOREX.com's charts

FOREX.com's charts are clear and sharp. If using a candlestick chart price type representation, the trader can see the numerical value for the High, Low, Open and Close by clicking on the candle, which can be useful for traders who take value levels into account when trading. The time frames available are from tick to 1 year, which is a relatively wide range (a platform such as cTrader has more finely grained time frames). There are 130+ technical indicators, which is well in the upper range for brokers, though some platforms can have more.

The indicators include popular ones such as RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, ATR, Moving Averages and the Trading Chaos indicators as well as more exotic indicators such as the Ehlers Fisher Transform. The trader can test out different indicators, perhaps having consulted what each technical indicator is about.

As well, there is a range of Drawing Tools, such as Gann and Trends Lines. The trader can place an order by right clicking on the chart and monitor is performance once placed. The trader can also close the position from the chart by right clicking on the order.

Tools on the platform

As well as the charting tools, there are other tools to help the trader in their analysis available from the Research and Analysis tab on the platform. There is News, an Economic Calendar, Market Analysis and Pivot Points. The trader can see that there is a Trading Automation tab. This is for creating trading systems which produce signals to enter and exit a trade on the chart. The trader can use ones already built or can build them in C#, .NET and Visual Basic with FOREX.com's Development Studio. The trader can also build technical indicators.

DMA trading

Demo account

The trader can test out all FOREX.com's online trading platforms, including the Advanced Trading Platform on FOREX.com's Demo Account.

On this account the trader can test out the platforms, practice trading and test out trading ideas, without risk.

Forex education

On the FOREX.com website there is an Education tab, which is divided into Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. The Beginner material explains Forex trading and explains how to make a Forex trade among other topics. the Intermediate material has topic covering Trading Plans and Technical and Fundamental Analysis. The Advanced material presents strategies, for example trading Non-Farm Payrolls (i.e. news trading) and Gold trading.

Automated trading with robots

While the Advanced Trading Platform offers automation to the level of trading signals, the trader may wish to automate more fully and let robots (computer programs) execute trades on the trader's behalf. This is available on MetaTrader 4 (MT4) which is offered at FOREX.com with full support for Expert Advisors (EAs), which are MetaTrader's online trading robots. The trader can download EAs or can build them in the MQL4 programming language. The trader may wish to execute automated strategies when not connected to the broker and FOREX.com supports the use of a Virtual Private Server (VPS). FOREX.com actually has a free VPS offer: T&Cs apply. This requires a maintenance of a minimum of $5000 in the trader's account and the execution of at least 10 round trip mini lots or equivalent in the trader's account per calendar month.