Forex Trading Platforms And Forex

Think of the "platform" as the roads and freeway system that connects all traders to the finanical markets including forex. At the base level, everyone must be connected to the Internet. On top of that layer of connection, all programs and systems must be able to talk to each other.

All data must be stored some where, and all users must connect to that some where - which is where the "platform" comes in. So, there are many data-centers around the World, and they all update each other so that there are many copies of the same information in many places.

When anything ever happens - either a trade or a piece of news - all the servers are updated super-fast, and all of us are connected to this information by means of the platform.

Every vendor of a forex trading robot or expert advisor has chosen to make his pruct "talk to" the World via a platform. By a very large margin, MetaTrader 4 is the platform of choice used by almost every company I have found so far.

It overcomes language issues, computer operating system issues, and works across all Internation jurisdictions.

Therefore, MetaTrader 4 is the best and most widely used solution for brokers, the banks and financial companies, dealing centers and of course the vendors of robots/advisors. The main advantages of the system are:

Coverage of financial markets

The trading platform MetaTrader 4 covers all International brokerage and trading activities at Forex, Futures and CFD markets. It is what is used for all reporting and news services.

Multi-currency basis

The system is designed on a multi-currency basis. It means that any currency can serve as a general currency used in the operation of the whole complex in any country and with any national currency.

Economy and productivity

the data transfer and processing protocols used by MetaTrader4 are notable for their economy. This means that low powered server such as a Pentium 4 2 GHz, 512 DDR RAM, 80 GB HDD can handle several thousand traders at the same time. Its new protocols reduce both the demands on datalink and the cost.

Reliability

Everything at the server end is backed up in several places. And these backups are synchronized. So if there ever was damage to the history it allows everything to be restored. Historical databases can be restored within several minutes, with the help of another MetaTrader 4 server.

Safety

To provide safety, all the information exchanged between parts of the complex is encrypted by 128-bit keys. Such solution guarantees safekeeping of information transferred and leaves no chance for a third person to use it. A built-in DDoS attacks guard-system raises the stability of operation of the server and the system as a whole.

DDoS is where a person may use thousands of infected computers to attack the MetaTrader4 server. DDoS-attacks resistance is therefore very important. What they do is hide the IP address of the server, and filter the incoming attacks. Data Centers also have a built-in DDoS-attacks protection systems. So the DDoS protection is at many levels.

Multi-lingual support

MetaTrader 4 supports different languages, and a Multi-Language Pack program is included into distributive packages. It provides translation of all program interfaces into any language. With the help of Multi-Language Pack you can easily create any language and integrate it into the program. This feature of the system brings MetaTrader 4 nearer to end-users in any country of the world.

Application Program Interfaces

Think of it as a "plug-in". MetaTrader 4 Server API makes it possible to customize the role of the platform to meet your requirements. Forex Robot vendors use the API to get their program to communicate with the platform. The API standardises everything and can solve a wide range of problems of:

creating additional analyzers for finding a trend of monthly increase of traders;

* creating applications of integration into other systems;

* extending the functionality of the server;

* implementing its own system work control mechanisms;

and do much more.

Integration with web-services

To provide traders with services of higher quality, the system supports the integration with web services (www, wap). This feature allows real-time publishing of quotations and charts on a website site, dynamic tables containing contest results and much more. This is also a very powerful feature relied upon by Expert Advisor vendors.

Flexibility of the system

The platform possesses a wide range of customizable functions. You can set all the parameters, from trade session times to detailed properties of the financial instruments of each user group.

Subadministration

Subadministration mechanisms allow many Introducing Brokers (IBs) on one server quite easily. For processing all accounts and orders of the clients of the IBs, only one server is needed.

Because of the power and flexibility of MetaTrader 4, that it can be used by all groups of people Internationally, and that all groups of users can talk to the server equally, it is the default choice for most Forex robot expert advisors.