Whether you trade foreign exchange markets as a hobby, are a full-time forex trader or trade different markets in the global marketplace, keeping tabs on what certain forex pairs are doing from day-to-day or even minute-to-minute, is potentially a crucial aspect to your success. Finding the best forex charts for your needs is therefore a must.
The Minimum Requirements
The thing to remember is that there is a minimum set of requirements in order to make forex charts useful at all. First and foremost is that the data you are receiving must be real-time and reliable – it’s no good if you’re trying to make decisions based on current fx rates when the data is not live or experiences severe slowdown when any volatility kicks in.
The next most important feature is that the forex charts need to be furnished with sufficient historical data in the timeframe that you trade in order to carry out useful technical analysis. This data should at the bare minimum be daily and intraday minute timeframe data.
To do any sort of cursory analysis, you’re also going to need some of the basic chart drawing tools and indicators. Drawing tools such as horizontal lines, trend lines and Fibonacci retracements and some simple indicators like volume, moving averages or RSI would be useful.
Free Forex Charts
You can of course get free forex charts and real-time data from a variety of sources these days. Google finance and Yahoo finance are probably two places where many will start and perhaps also somewhere like fxstreet. But there are more advanced charting tools available to a trader that are still free. freestockcharts is fantastic not only for stocks but also for forex and of course there’s one of my favorite free charting tools available online over at tradingview.
But we really should not overlook the fact that you can get some very decent forex charts with a free MT4 demo account.
Premium Forex Charts
If you require a rather more substantial charting/trading package with some premium indicators and trading features, there are plenty of these about too. TradeStation has been a stalwart for many at Netpicks for a number of years. Esignal is another platform that many swear by and offers a great deal of flexibility. CQG and Market Delta start to become even more of a premium but offer some great technical analysis features for those that require them.
Whether you trade it or not, forex is a huge part of the global market place, with trillions of dollars’ worth a day transacting. In effect it’s the lifeblood of any market and big moves in currencies can have an impact on many different markets.
So if you don’t already have the ability to chart and track forex, I suggest you take a look today.
Trade well.