Dave Tromp

In this article I will tell you about the possible tools you have at your disposal for trading. Whether you are building a fence, or building a trading strategy, you need tools to get the work done. In the previous articles we already looked at the question of why, how, what and where to trade. Now it is time to get some tools and setup an infrastructure for trading. We basically need three types of tools.

In this article I will discuss Forex and CFD brokers and how to find one for successful trading. Many of the ideas that I share about Forex and CFD brokers will also apply to brokers of other securities like Bonds, Stocks, ETFs and Options. I am a big proponent of building your own infrastructure. However, as a retail trader there is only so much you can do. It is not cost effective to pay for direct access to an exchange and co-locating some trading servers right there at the exchange. That is not what this article is about. This article is about building a trading infrastructure that is flexible and independent enough to be able to execute trades through any broker you see fit. I believe that you should not get locked into a platform in a way that it will allow you to only trade with the broker that provides the platform. That is why I use spreadsheets, open source programming frameworks / libraries (python) and freely available charting software to do my trading analysis. But firs…