What Are The Best Platforms To Learn Forex Trading?

We can attest to OANDA’s suitability for beginners with their OANDA Trade platform simplifying CFD trading and including a guaranteed stop loss order.

With over 100 drawing tools, numerous technical indicators, and real-time forex industry updates, you will be well-equipped to make informed decisions. The manual leverage adjustment is helpful for those learning the ropes.

After testing OANDA’s proprietary trading platform, OANDA Trade, we can safely say it’s one of the best beginner platforms we’ve traded with.

USER-FRIENDLY PLATFORM

We found OANDA’s web trader platform user-friendly and packed with analysis tools. These include over 100 drawing tools and a plethora of technical indicators. We liked the touch of seeing real-time news updates directly on the platform so we could stay up-to-date with the latest in the forex industry.

For novice traders like some of our team, the ability to manually set leverage when trading CFDs on OANDA Trade is an excellent feature. This is particularly significant because many top-tier brokers don’t permit altering leverage from its maximum limit, which can amplify the inherent risks of forex trading.

LOW SPREADS

Out of all the market maker brokers we’ve reviewed, OANDA has the lowest spreads of the lot, averaging 0.70 pips across the 5 major currency pairs. Not only that, OANDA recorded the lowest Standard account spreads of any broker, including those offering ECN-style execution like IC Markets and Fusion Markets.

We found OANDA’s low spreads were stable and helped reduce our slippage on trades when using both MT4 and the OANDA Trade platform, which will help you lower your trading costs as a beginner.

HIGHLY TRUSTED BROKER

OANDA is a highly trusted broker with a strong reputation, which is why they are well-suited for beginners.

We scored OANDA a 10/10 for trust based on our methodology which includes regulations, age of the broker, and search volume on the web.

What impresses us the most is how heavily regulated OANDA is, especially by tier-1 regulators such as ASIC in Australia, the FCA in the UK and the NFA/CFTC in the U.S., which not many brokers can boast from our analysis.

Also, the fact that OANDA was established in 1996 and has built a solid reputation for itself over almost 30 years (evidenced by the broker’s many positive TrustPilot reviews), catches our eye.

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With no-dealing desk execution, Pepperstone has low spreads and fast trading execution making it a good choice for new traders. Pepperstone has average spreads of 0.1 pips for EUR/USD and limit order execution speeds of 77 ms which are impressive.

Another aspect we like is the 4 quality trading platforms – TradingView, MT4, MT5 and cTrader. Lastly, Pepperstone also has good 3rd party tools like Myfxbook, DupliTrade and 28EAs with Smart Trader Tools.

Though Pepperstone isn’t regulated in the UAE, the broker has always stood out to us for its fast execution speeds, competitive spreads and diverse range of forex trading platforms. It also has the best forex trading platform experience in the UAE, which will suit beginners.

100% ZERO PIP SPREADS

Everyone wants zero pip spreads and most brokers with RAW accounts advertise ‘spreads from zero.’ Well, from our testing, Pepperstone is one of those brokers that offers zero pip spreads 100% of the time.

When looking at data for hourly minimum spreads, by currency, for each broker, only Pepperstone and City Index achieved zero pip spreads 100% of the time for the 6 major currency pairs.

FAST EXECUTION SPEEDS

As a beginner, you want to lower your trading fees and one way to do that is through fast execution speeds to reduce slippage on trades. From our testing, Pepperstone has some of the fastest execution speeds out there.

Testing via the MT4 platform revealed Pepperstone achieved speeds of 77ms for limit orders and 100ms for market orders. This put the broker third overall out of more than 30 brokers tested, just behind BlackBull Markets and Fusion Markets.

BEST FOREX TRADING PLATFORM

Pepperstone has a diverse range of trading platforms including MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, cTrader and TradingView (a personal favourite).

From a beginner perspective, however, we think Pepperstone stands out in its MetaTrader 4 offering. Not only will you get the ease of use, charting tools (30 technical indicators, 21 analytical objects and 9 timeframes), and enormous range of Expert Advisors that we’ve come to expect from MT4, Pepperstone also offers the Smart Trader Tools MT4 add-on, an additional 28 smart trading apps, including expert advisors and indicators.

Some of our favourite apps for beginners include the session map, which highlights key economic events in red based on the 4 major trading regions (New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney) and the trade terminal.

While the trade terminal has several features, we particularly liked that you could easily select multiple orders and set take profit and stop loss orders 10,20 or 30 pips apart for each, without having to set them individually.

The remaining platforms Pepperstone offers (MT5, cTrader and TradingView) are all excellent and diverse forex trading platforms for different purposes.

MT5 is an upgrade of MT4 with more trading tools and the ability to trade on centralised exchanges, cTrader features DoM (depth of market) pricing and algorithmic trading tools, TradingView is one of our favourite standalone charting platforms with 100 pre-built indicators and Capitalise.ai allows you to automate your trading without knowledge of programming code.