Help with the right chart package for Forex please.

Forex whether traded through a spread firm (wider spreads) or broker (narrower spreads) cannot report it's trades back to the market place as efficiently as say CBOT, where a buyer and seller agree a price and that price is reported back, logged and sold to chart vendors ...it is in effect cast in stone.

I'm probably using quite an inflexible charting package, but I noticed that the high on a chart today didn't correspond with the high reported on the trading screen. I found out from the tech help people at the spread firm (who provide the chart package) that to see the high as it appears on the trading window I must press the "ask" button on the chart. What that does is move the whole chart up three ticks, but all the lows jump with it, in fact the whole chart jumps up. It's ok for instantly eyeballing the high (which I can do anyway on the trading page ..so a pointless exercise imo) but more importantly/annoyingly it means that all lines I've drawn, horizontal or otherwise, are redundant.

As I mentioned in my first paragraph, I realise FX reporting isn't and can't be as efficient as electronic futures or floor traded futures...I accept that, however, I'd be willing and would hope to get a feed that was coming from a keener/narrower priced source that would give me a) a better idea of where market highs, lows, highs/lows of individual bars actually were and b) that the chart package was customisable to the extent that if I wanted to see a real high, or high ask on a bar, that I could increase it's length and all others required while leaving low bid bars intact and as they were so that channels etc didn't become redundant.

I'm by no means a technical analysist but I do use the charts and need the charts for certain tasks and they help me immensely. How do pro TAs and non pro TAs cope with this problem ?

Thanks in advance.

The prices you see in spot forex are indicative rather than traded, the latter being what exchanges report. When you plot the bid you can see where you could have sold. When you plot the offer, that's where you could have bought. One or the other may be more relevant to you at a give point in time. Most folks end up sticking with either the bid or the mid. No matter what, if you only use one (some systems allow plotting bid and offer) then you'll have to do the mental math to figure out where the extremes were.

Thanks for the reply Rhody Trader. I accept the fact and can live with the fact that FX price reporting is indicative rather than a report of contracts traded at an actual known price.

To keep shifting from ask prices at higher levels and bid prices at lower levels is cumbersome, tedious, messes with drawn lines (as mentioned before) and most importantly, a level may be of some significance/importance and could be interpreted at any point in say a 4 pt range by any number of people.

I'd settle for a chart package that gave a mid price only. At least it's an indication of an average price that many will be looking at. If there was a package that offered such, I'd consider taking it.

Otherwise I'd seriously consider using a brokerage outfit and have a chart that was taking prices off a narrower spread.


God, life was so simple on the trading floor !

hackenbush78 said:

To keep shifting from ask prices at higher levels and bid prices at lower levels is cumbersome, tedious, messes with drawn lines (as mentioned before) and most importantly, a level may be of some significance/importance and could be interpreted at any point in say a 4 pt range by any number of people.

!

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You don't really need it to be any more specific in FX than that. I would never get hung up on whether a key level was 1.5075, 1.5077 or 1.5079 in cable. Just noise. If it matters that much to you I'm guessing you're doing something daft on a 5 minute chart, something like that. In which case you are truly misguided if you think chart levels at that resolution are respected.

GJ