Charting Options
For those that trade short term, having a solid charting package is an absolute must if you want to turn your short term trades into long term profits. Long term success in the marketplace revolves around having good information and having it in a timely manner is one of the most important things you can do. This is especially true of binary options trading, since many of these options last for 15 minutes or shorter. Technical analysis is the most important thing here, and this is only possible with a good charting package .
The chart you use will depend upon what you are trading. For currency pairs, MetaTrader 4 is currently your best choice. This package has every currency pair that you can imagine, plus all of the important timeframes, ranging from one minute intervals up to daily. There are also all of the major indicators that can be applied and superimposed onto the charts you create. MT4 gives you the ability to also apply any lines or indicators that you would like to put on your charts, too, giving you a lot more flexibility than the majority of other charting packages can, which puts this package in a league of its own. MT4 updates in real time as data occurs, and best of all, it is completely free to use.
For other types of assets, if you are trading them short term, you may need to buy the charting software in order to ensure that you get accurate real time updates. There are many strong choices out there, especially when it comes to trading stocks. Regardless of what you are trading, however, there are a few things that you will want to be on the lookout for.
The first thing to look at is the indicators that are offered. If you rely heavily on Bollinger Bands. for example, you will want to make sure that your package can create these automatically and allow you to customize your own variables. You also want to make sure that you can put more than one indicator on the same screen. This allows you to do a better job of double checking your work and this can help you to reduce some of the more common errors that you might face.
Customization is going to be the key to profits. The very best charts will allow you to look at the timeframes you want, with the indicators specifically designed to assist you with your personal strategy. Everyone trades a little differently and charts are definitely not a one size fits all thing. To be as successful as possible, you need to personalize your charts in order to get the most out of them.
The few dollars you might spend on getting a top of the line charting package will be worth it as you will have more information at your disposal, and thus will have a better chance of binary options trading success.
Charting is not as important for options that end at the conclusion of the week or the month, so there is no point in paying for a package if you do not need to. You will still want to consult a chart before you act, but you don’t need real time. Looking at an end of the day chart will give you all of the information that you will need to be a success . Free resources like Yahoo! or BigCharts are great for trading stocks and indices. If you wish to trade the major commodities, sites like CommodityCharts can be pretty helpful as well as ThinkorSwim. Charts will help you, but for longer term trades, fundamental analysis will help you more than the information that you find on a chart.