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How to choose a trading terminal to work on the exchange



Today for investors there are a large number of tools for transactions with various assets on the exchange. The main trading tool is a special terminal, that is, software that reflects important market data, and there is the possibility of placing orders.

It can be difficult for beginners to navigate and choose software with a convenient interface, risk management and testing strategies. In today's article, we will talk about what criteria are worth paying attention to.

Types of Trading Applications


Today, there are 4 main ways to make transactions on the exchange online:

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  • Automated trading systems . According to statistics, for quite some time now, most of the transactions on modern exchanges are made by robots. At its core, these are programs that trade in accordance with their strategy. We wrote quite a lot about robots ( here , here and here ), today we just mention that you can create them using the API of our trading system SMARTcom .

Today we will talk about the first option - desktop terminals for trading. What should I look for when choosing them?

Own development of a broker or external solution


At the moment, dozens of brokers are working in the Russian stock market. These include both banks that offer their customers access services to the exchange, and companies that engage exclusively in brokerage activities. The sizes of these companies also vary greatly, so not all of them can afford to develop their own software solutions for their customers.

Such brokers provide their customers with a popular trading program called QUIK. Here is what the interface of this application looks like:



At the same time, those companies that have sufficient resources also develop their own trading solutions. There are a number of reasons for this:

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A trading terminal is an important tool in which any click in which can lead to a successful transaction or financial loss. Therefore, the system interface should be convenient and customizable. Therefore, we in the SMARTx terminal provided the ability to connect an additional desktop, activate a dark theme, as well as the Quotes plugin, with which you can create an unlimited number of tables with quotes, and not one, as usual.



Risk management functions


Trading software should make it possible to configure risk management parameters that will allow controlling risk, minimizing possible losses during trading, and also more reliably taking profit on transactions.

For example, it is good if the program allows you to configure a ban on placing new applications and opening new positions on a specific account in case of violation of the established conditions.

It is also important that the software has the ability to use orders such as stop loss, take profit and sliding stop orders. Such orders are used to protect open positions - if the price goes down sharply, losses will be limited, and profit will be fixed. The SMARTx terminal has the ability to place bundles of such orders (and there is also a module that prohibits transactions in case of violation of the conditions).



Performance


For the trading terminal, performance is important. The program should work equally well on old or weak computers / tablets, when making tens or hundreds of transactions per day, with large-scale movements in the market.

In the days of the release of important economic news, the amount of market data (market data) sent by the server to the terminal can increase tenfold in a short time. If the program is not optimized enough and is running on a weak device, it can simply freeze at the most crucial moment, which can result in a user losing money.

In addition, there is a whole class of active traders on the market (for example, scalpers, arbitrageurs and high frequency traders) who carry out a large number of orders and transactions even on a regular trading day. Such merchants rarely use GUI terminals for direct trading, but often use similar software to control their positions, however a large amount of data generated by them, even a powerful computer can “not digest”.

The merchant must be able to cope with all such cases. Therefore, we are constantly working to increase the productivity and speed of the SMARTx terminal. Here in this article a couple of years ago we talked about this work in more detail.

Conclusion: it is very important to check everything


These criteria are very important, but I do not want to test them in combat mode with the possibility of real losses for obvious reasons. Therefore, it is important that the broker whose terminal you are considering enable test access. Our trading system has a test engine with which you can check all the functions of the terminal using a test account with virtual money. You can connect it by the link .

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