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It appears that the trend in trader questions landing in my inbox these days is to ask questions in multiple parts. Another one came in over the weekend from a trader who prefaced his questions by saying

I have been trading(training) for one year now, hard work does pay off…I took a 15 hour in class forex course a year ago and since then I have been practicing, doing homework every single day, trying to understand everything and I am at the level where I know what I am doing, (99.99%)  I am taking forex very seriously and it is my long term career.  I have all of my strategies worked out and just started to trade last month along with my own trading system which I am implementing B4 placing an order.

The first question this intrepid new(ish) trader had for me was whether I would recommend using charting software, and if so which one would I suggest.

To answer the first part of the inquiry I’m going to say it depends. There are a great many free charting resources out there. Most brokers (forex and otherwise) these days have one through their platforms. Some are certainly better than others. My recommendation is that if your broker has what you need in terms of functionality and timeframe, then I see no reason why you need to spend money on some other charting software, and the price data to feed it.

For my part, I’m a bit mixed. Some of what I do is readily available through most broker charting packages. There are things, however, which are not. That’s stuff like custom indicators (I do some studies on volatility) and system testing. Also, some forex brokers in particular don’t offer charts in longer timeframes, like weekly and monthly. For that reason, I do use paid charting.

In terms of a good general charting package my preferred one is MetaStock. I’ve been using it for over a decade now. The charts are nice. I can do all sorts of things with custom indicators. I can also do loads of systems testing. It’s very handy. (Full Disclosure: I currently am employed by Thomson Reuters, of which MetaStock is part. I, however, came from the Thomson side into the merger and had been a paid user of the charting package since the 90s.)

The other package I use regularly is Sierra Chart. In particular, I do my price distribution analysis with this package (employing the TPO charts). There’s also a really nice play-back feature that I’ve used a couple of times in the videos I have produced. The one thing I would say is that when looking for a source of price distribution charts I found other packages which had what I thought were nicer presentations, but since I was only using that one feature I didn’t see a justification of the much higher price tags.

Related Articles at The Essentials of Trading:

Trader Wish List - Eleventh InstallmentWhat forex charting packages are there?Can you tell me where I can find free forex charts?What Trading Resources are Your Favorites?Looking for a stock screener?