With the first one, you will obtain a valid quote but you will not feel market’s rhythms, which are of utmost importance in gauging various games people play when speculating. This is particularly important immediately following news announcements, as key players implement their trading strategies.

While simple platforms will exhibit a “jump” in the price from one minute to the next, the professional ones will clearly show the tension and “fight” for each PIP in the arena.

Usually, brokerage houses offer some basic packages free of charge and use their own data feed to update the programs, but you will have just limited understanding on what is really going on.

Thanks to more than 10 years in the market, I believe you will be better off with a subscription to an independent real-time data provider. Even if the cost is higher, the performance is far superior.

As this is their primary business, they tend to allocate important resources to you as a customer and of course, they update and improve their platform on a regular basis.

Because I will avoid advertising any company names on this article, I will just invite you to consider asking the following questions before deciding.

Web-based or desktop-based platform. While the first one is more mobile, the second one tends to have more features.

Number of regularly updated currencies pairs. The key is to have at least the majors regularly updated (EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY, USD/CHF), but of course, the more pairs the better.