Trading Platforms And Long Term Trading
Traders may find that after their initial enthusiasm that they lose interest in trading. This can partly be because trading is hard as markets are complex and react in unpredictable ways. Thus the early enthusiasm fades into this realisation. The trader can though react in various ways, from taking a break to continuing but with changes to the way they trade. Or they can continue as they were going, but learning from their experience.
One potential way to help stick with trading is perhaps to choose a trading platform for the long term. Such a trading platform could be one which the trader can grow into or feels comfortable using. In general trading platforms have basic similarities, with charts and charting tools. What the long term is can depend on what kind of path the trader takes or wants to take. For example the trader may be interested in planning and executing their own trades and learning directly from the experience of others. One approach then is to trade on a user friendly platform with social trading and copy trading. This way the trader can see the views of other traders and can copy their trades, while at the same time being able to expand their own trading experience on the platform.
However a Forex trader may wish to learn by trading but then also have the possibility of automating their trades with robots, to trade on their behalf. The trader does not control the trading of those whose trades they copy, but can control which robot to use even to the extent of programming the robots themselves. Thus to some extent the robot can be an extension of the trader, though it will execute trades in accordance with its programmed algorithms and can and will produce trading behaviour different from the trader.
MetaTrader 4 (MT4) is an online trading platform provided by many brokers, which offers both automated and non-automated trading. However MT4 has a successor, but not so far a replacement, which is MetaTrader 5 (MT5). MT5 has a number of improvements on MT4, including more inbuilt indicators, time frames and graphical objects in addition to a new programming language used to build its EA robots (MQL5). So to trade with a wide range of tools and to be able to grow into more advanced types of trading as experience improves, then MT5 is a possible choice as best trading platform for the long term.
However the trader may not wish to use robots or social and copy trading and may instead want an intuitive platform which they will potentially feel comfortable using. Thus to cover these three types of traders, then eToro is chosen for its user friendly platform with social and copy trading, Pepperstone is picked for its offering of MT4 and MT5 as well as cTrader (cTrader is a platform which is relatively user friendly and has powerful features thus may make a choice for a long term platform in and of itself) and TradingView and Plus500 is chosen for its intuitive trading platform designed for the trader who plans and executes their own trades. The trader can test out all of these platforms as demos before live trading.
