Best Forex Charts

Forex trading is a fast-paced and dynamic market, where having access to accurate and reliable charts is crucial for success. This article dives into some of the best forex charts available in the market today. From user-friendly interfaces to advanced technical analysis tools, these charts offer a range of features to help you analyze market trends and make profitable trades. Whether you are trading on your computer or mobile device, these charts will provide you with the insights you need to navigate the forex market with confidence.

Quick Look: Best Forex Charts

• Best for Powerful and Customizable Forex Charts: FOREX.com
• Best for all Traders: Trading View
• Best for Futures Trading: NinjaTrader
• Best for Automated Trading: MetaTrader 4
• Best for ECN Traders: cTrader

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Disclosure: CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 74% to 76% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work, and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money. The products and services available to you at FOREX.com will depend on your location and on which of its regulated entities holds your account

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Take a look at the recommendations for best forex charts.

Best for Powerful and Customizable Forex Charts: FOREX.com

FOREX.com allows you to create new orders directly from their charts with a simple click and drag to edit an existing order. They offer over 80 technical indicators from Bollinger Bands, MACD, Parabolic SAR, customizable indicators and much more. Allowing you to utilize the chart that matches your trading style.

You’ll have access to 14 time intervals to help identify trading patterns using specific time intervals. You can choose options such as one-minute, daily, monthly and more. FOREX.com has multiple chart types and styles to customize what you need and clearly identify trend lines. Additionally, you’ll have access to over 50 drawing tools with undo and redo buttons along with tons of customizable features to tailor everything to your needs.

Additionally, FOREX.com offers multiple trading platforms including MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, Advanced Trading (desktop), Web Trading platforms, TradingView and NinjaTrader. Making it a great one stop shop for traders.

Best for All Traders: TradingView

TradingView is a cloud-based charting platform that connects a network of 15 million professional and amateur traders and investors.

The platform features over 200,000 trading ideas per month with thousands of custom scripts and indicators for retail traders. If you’re planning to trade directly from the platform, you will have to connect it to one of the supported brokerages.

TradingView also offers a free mobile app, so you can access the market data from anywhere.

The basic account offers a majority of the platform functions — worldwide market data coverage, smart drawing tools, customizable chart types and even strategy backtesting.

Premium plans start at $14.95 per month and offer perks like server-side alerts, data export and custom time intervals.

Best for Futures Trading: NinjaTrader

NinjaTrader is an online forex broker known for its futures trading services which are among the most popular on the market. It also offers forex market charts for trading currency pairs. 

Contrary to its cloud-based services, NinjaTrader has a state-of-art standalone platform. But, it requires installation, and since it offers plenty of functionalities, it can be an overwhelming experience for new traders.

NinjaTrader’s platform is free to use with all funded brokerage accounts ($400 for futures or $50 for forex) and offers chart feeds, market analysis as well as backtesting capabilities.

The platform also features Ecosystem, a 3rd-party developer community that offers thousands of 3rd-party apps and add-on tools that you can integrate. In case you are C# proficient, you can build your own add-ons.

Along with the developer community, the NinjaTrader platform offers plenty of educational materials, on-demand training videos and an informative YouTube channel.

Best for Automated Trading: MetaTrader 4

MetaTrader 4 continues to reign supreme among retail traders, cementing its position as the go-to platform for forex trading. Celebrated for its robust suite of features, MetaTrader 4 offers a rich array of advanced charting tools, various types of price charts, and a comprehensive selection of built-in technical indicators. It supports a wide range of timeframes from the quick 1-minute snapshots to expansive monthly views, catering to all trading styles.

Customization is a hallmark of MetaTrader 4. You can tailor the look and feel of your charts to your precise preferences, and manage multiple charts simultaneously across different tabs. This is particularly advantageous for quickly navigating between various currency pairs and their charts. The platform’s charts are not just visually adaptable—they are also incredibly functional. You can resize them with ease and add technical tools like trend lines, channels, Fibonacci Retracements, or horizontal support and resistance lines with a single click.

Best for ECN Traders: cTrader

cTrader is a forex trading platform developed by the London-based company, cTrader Limited. Distinguished for its tailored design for use with ECN brokers. cTrader excels in two key areas: trade execution and charting.

Each chart’s color settings in cTrader can be fully customized beyond the standard green and red bars on a black background. By default, every new chart opens with the platform's default color scheme, so if you prefer a different setup, you’ll need to adjust the colors for each new chart you open. However, the platform preserves your layout and settings exactly as they were when you last closed it, so your preferences are maintained between sessions.

For timeframes, while most charting packages offer the common 1, 5, and 15-minute intervals below the 1-hour mark, cTrader provides a more extensive range. You can select from unique intervals like 45, 20, and 10 minutes, down to 1 minute and even tick-based options. Above the 1-hour level, along with the typical 4-hour, daily, weekly, and monthly views.

The platform includes a comprehensive list of over 50 indicators categorized into Trend, Oscillator, Volatility, and Volume, with an additional section for Other indicators. This extensive collection covers a broad spectrum of trading needs, featuring popular tools like Moving Averages, MACD, Stochastics, and Bollinger Bands. For traders who depend on specific indicators or settings, it’s advisable to download a demo version of cTrader to ensure it meets your requirements.

Why Use a Forex Chart?

Forex charts are visual representations of historical price movements. Using a forex chart relies on analyzing the patterns to find periods where history is likely to repeat itself. This goes back to 18^th century Japan when savvy traders used patterns to predict prices of rice.

Pattern recognition relies on the fact that price presents the current consensus among market participants (buyers and sellers). This consensus oscillates between fear and greed with the periodical influence of news.

Common Types of Forex Charts

These are the main styles of forex charts:

Tick Chart

Tick charts display price updates in the form of bars, with each bar representing a tick. Price updates can occur multiple times per second, with changes ranging from small to significant. Unlike candlestick charts, tick charts are not based on time intervals but instead show the smallest level granularity for measuring intervals.

Line Chart

The line chart is the simplest, most basic form of the chart. It connects the closing prices of the selected time period and provides little other info. While limited, a line chart is handy when it comes to assessing the trend — as it makes spotting the cues like higher highs and higher lows.

Bar Chart

A chart that shows both high and lows. It has 3 visual cues embedded in a single line. One vertical line shows the size of the move within a period, a small point on the left shows the opening level and a small point on the right indicates the closing level.

Candlestick Chart

An improved version of the bar chart, it has 2 main elements — body and shadows. The body of the candlestick shows the range between the opening and closing prices. The size of the body shows the size of the move within a certain period. Meanwhile, a candlestick can have an upper shadow, a lower shadow, both or neither. Shadows give cues on price retracements and future price movements.

Heiken-Ashi Chart

The Heiken-Ashi chart is an improved candlestick that uses averages to track trends. Because the candlesticks on a Heiken-Ashi chart are more uniform, you can easily track the performance of any asset instead of reading between the lines to find upward and downward trends.

Renko Chart

Renko charts post bricks when the price of a currency pair moves a certain amount. You can follow the bricks, knowing how much the price is shifting from one brick to another. This is an easy way to track trends and also internalize how much the pairing is changing without doing any extra math.

Point and Figure Chart

Point and figure charts use Xs and Os to measure the change in price of a currency pairing over long periods of time. By adding only Xs and Os, you can track 1-year, 5-year and 10-year trends or more on a small chart. These final 3 (Heiken-Ashi, Renko or Point and Figure) are the best forex charts for reducing risk and clarifying market data.

Pattern recognition and exploitation are the basic premises behind the best forex charts. Due to their efficiency, Japanese candlestick patterns rose in popularity in recent decades. Great reading on the topic is “Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns” by Thomas N. Bulkowski.

It's a Game of Patterns and Patience

Regardless of whether you are a beginner, intermediate or an advanced investor — today even the free forex charting services will meet your needs.

The basic premise behind using charts to predict price movement comes from the inherent ability to look for patterns. Over the millennia, human brains evolved to recognize and exploit patterns, and that drove the rise of this civilization.

Yet, the brain still retained its primitive parts responsible for traumatic responses. When faced with market-induced anxiety, this response can be a significant risk to any traders' performance.

Regardless of the pattern-spotting abilities, only the traders that manage to enforce self-discipline will become consistently successful.

Trading forex is impossible without relying on a reputable broker. Check out our comparison of forex brokers that might help you start trading on the currency markets today.

Frequently Asked Questions