Free Forex Tools for Today’s Trader

Ten years ago, many of the forex tools available today were either in the early stage of development or did not exist. Today, they are virtually commonplace. Today’s retail traders are therefore in a much better place now than their counterparts were as at the time the first iPhones were hitting the market in 2006.

In this article, easy-forex presents four of these forex tools which are available at no cost at all. They are as follows:

1)      The Economic Calendar

This is the schedule of forex news release to the market, and is one of the tools used in fundamental analysis. The news may determine market bias and therefore market direction. Even if you do not want to trade the news, you should to at least know what it could do to your open trades. The news does not respect chart patterns or indicators. It does what it wants to do and everyone else is expected to align to the realities that the news imparts to the market.

Ideally every retail trader may have access to the Economic Calendar. It comes in various forms and is available on the website of almost every broker that there is out there. If you are a news trader, or you use news trading to formulate a trade plan, then this tool may be useful.

2)      Chart Pattern Recognition Tool

Chart patterns are just one of the ways to pick out potentially profitable opportunities in forex. However, they may be extremely effective at spotting opportunity for profit. The problem many traders have though is how to recognize them as they are evolving, as well as when they are completed.

This is where the chart pattern recognition tool comes in. For a long time, Autochartist was the only one available. Nowadays, the MQL5 community has brought together programmers that have brought their creativity to bear in producing various versions of the chart pattern recognition tool. Some brokers offer this product as well.

3)      EA Builders

There was also a time when you could only get an EA by using a programmer. Several companies have put out products and software that have bypassed this process. Now there are several expert advisor builders that allow traders to put their strategies to work in the market. A trader with a particular idea of how to potentially profit from the market may use an EA builder to transform the idea into a forex robot. There are several of these software available out there. Some are free to use while others require some form of payment to have access to these web-based software. It is important to note that none come with any guarantee of profit and do not eliminate the risk associated with forex trading.

4)      Candlestick Pattern Recognition Software

For a long time, there was no real software that could identify candlestick patterns. There are quite a few of them now. The challenge though is that this software does not differentiate candlestick patterns with high success probability from those which are not very helpful. So traders will still need to have the knowledge of knowing which patterns picked out by this software to use for their trading activity.