It’s easy to see why financial market trading is so popular to those who want to secure a new career or create an additional (and passive) stream of income, but making your way in this diverse and global space is no mean feat at all.
Firstly, there’s a wide range of markets and asset classes that you can target in the modern age, while entities such as foreign exchange are incredibly volatile and capable of causing you to lose more money than you can afford.
In this post, we’ll look at the best tools for new traders and ask precisely why they’re so useful from the perspective of investors.
1. The MetaTrader 4 (MT4)
We’ll start with the MetaTrader 4 (and to a lesser extent, the MetaTrader 5) apps, which are outstanding trading platforms that enable investors to hone and develop expert advisor software across a raft of marketplaces.
This type of software is pivotal, as it enables you to create customisable charts to suit your trading strategies and can ultimately lay the platform for automated trading over time.
The MT4 was actually developed and launched in 2005, with the subsequent MT5 platform released onto the mainstream market five years later in 2010. Interestingly, despite being marketed as an upgrade on its predecessor, the MT5 has failed to topple the MT4, with the former benefiting from its intuitive interface and incredibly familiar nature.
The MT4 is also easy to use, as you can establish your own unique parameters and wait for the app’s software to generate relevant trading signa;s. You can also access a wide range of analytical tools and technical indicators, allowing for more informed decision making in real-time.
2. The Economic Calendar
Next up is the economic calendar, which should be a common feature across all online and mobile trading platforms.
Such calendars are home to a raft of economic events and scheduled data releases, with each entry marked according to its potential market and value as a real-time forecasting tool.
When using the economic calendar (which may vary in terms of presentation from one platform to another), you should consider highlighting the important events that are relevant to your portfolio, while understanding how they’re likely to influence the market and the price of certain assets.
Over time, you’ll eventually create a streamlined personal calendar, and one that can help you to navigate potentially volatile markets such as the foreign change with far greater ease.
3. A Trading Journal
Last, but by no means least, we come to the classic trading journal. With this incredibly simple but effective tool, you can track your own trading activity and create an accurate record of your successes and failures over time.
This may be particularly helpful if you engage in high-frequency or day trading, as it helps you to oversee even high volumes of activity and try to seek some method in the ongoing mayhem.
You can capture these records with as much or as little detail as you like, depending on your objectives and how you want to evolve over time.
Ultimately, the data included in your trading journal (which can be also accessed through various trading platforms) can provide unique insights into your trading decisions, including your motivation for executing certain orders and the ways in which you manage your portfolio overall.
