With the new 'Custom Start' feature, you can now specify a date that your Trade Explorer begins including brokerage account history. Strategies change, styles evolve, traders become smarter – all are good reasons you might want to exclude old performance from your metrics. While traders shouldn't forget lessons of the past, it's a lot easier to analyze performance when irrelevant trades are excluded.

To set up a custom start date, click 'Options' at the top-right of your Trade Explorer, and enter a date in the 'Custom Start' section, as shown below.



You may have also noticed that we recently changed the graph setup on the 'Overview' tab. Instead of one Flash-based graph, the Trade Explorer now has four image-based graphs on the main tab. This change gives you a thorough overview of the account with just a glance, plus it loads faster because it's no longer based on Flash technology (which was our initial motivation for changing).



The new graphs also interact with the 'Performance' table rows – click the small blue icon on each row to make the graphs represent only that particular period. This is a handy way to zoom in on performance for the year, month, week, or day.



Haven't tried the Trade Explorer yet? Get started here! Or if you have feedback or ideas for improvement, we're always glad to hear from you.

Our newest feature interconnects three Forex Factory products – the Calendar, News, and Market – to bring you unprecedented insight into how fundamentals are affecting the market.



As shown above, news stories and calendar events are represented by the familiar factory-shaped impact icons at the bottom of the Market chart. Clicking the icons will bring you to the corresponding news story or calendar event for more detail. Impact icons can be turned on or off from the options below the chart, and only News impacts are turned on by default.



Give it a try and let us know what you think!

We're pleased to announce the beta-release of Trades, a new product that tells you who's buying, who's selling, and who's winning!



The data for Trades is aggregated from members sharing their Trade Explorer information (i.e., permissions set to 'Public'), and the default settings only show activity from live brokerage accounts (i.e., no demos). Best of all, you can trust that the performance metrics are legitimate! The live/demo distinction cannot be faked on the Trade Explorer, and as we confirmed last month, all trade statistics are based on equity, so open positions are included in the metrics.

While the default settings only show live accounts, Trades is based on our Flexbox technology, so you can customize the content of the Trade Feed and Leaderboard applications.



There's also a very useful filter on the Trade Feed. You can adjust the setting to show only your buddies' trades, or only EUR/USD trades, for instance.



The default Leaderboard shows which traders are having the best month, and it can also be configured to display annual or weekly periods. To help keep the rankings pure, only Trade Explorers with equity greater than 100 currency units (dollars/euros/pounds/etc.) are included in the rankings, and commercial members are excluded.



So there you have it – a powerful new tool to assist you in your pursuit of profits!

PS, If you don't have a Trade Explorer yet, get one here!

You've probably seen this awesome feature on the more advanced trading platforms – and now the Trade Explorer has it too!



To open a charted trade, just click the chart icon () for any trade on the Trade List tab. You can also option to show other trades on that instrument by checking 'Show Surrounding Trades.'



Haven't tried the Trade Explorer yet? Get started here! Or if you have feedback or ideas for improvement, we're always glad to hear from you.

If a hedge fund manager tells you he's "up 8% this month," he's invariably including the profit/loss of his open trades. That's because the financial industry speaks in terms of equity, which includes the marked-to-market value of open trades. And it's that way for a reason – the profit/loss on an open trade is every bit as real as on a closed trade, and performance metrics can be completely misleading when open trade activity is excluded.

As Product Manager for the Trade Explorer, I hear from members who are concerned that their Trade Explorer's statistics are not as favorable as shown on other sites offering trade analytics. Most of the time the discrepancy is due to the trader carrying open losses in their account, which are only being accounted for on their Trade Explorer.

To illustrate this point, I opened a demo account and entered ten random trades. Then I closed the five trades that were winning and left the losing trades open. Here are a few metrics, for the same account, from Trade Explorer and Myfxbook:

Trade Explorer







Myfxbook







The account performance looks a lot better on Myfxbook because their statistics are based on balance, thereby ignoring the huge open loss. Since the Trade Explorer's statistics are all based on equity, the open loss is reflected throughout all metrics, making the performance appear worse.

It's not just these top-level statistics that are affected by the choice of equity or balance. Periodic metrics (e.g., How much did I make yesterday? How much did I make last February?) will change dramatically depending on how open trades are accounted for.

Out of the other eight sites we know of offering Forex performance analyzers, half of them are mostly balance-based, three are somewhat equity-based, and only one does a good job of reporting equity throughout. Since the Trade Explorer is one of the two analyzers that is completely equity-based, there's a good chance your performance will, at times when you have an open loss, look worse on the Trade Explorer than elsewhere.

While this may keep some people from using the Trade Explorer, equity-based statistics are a must for professional traders. And professional traders are who the Trade Explorer was built for! We went to great lengths when developing the product to ensure that it was in line with financial industry standards, and that everything was based on equity.

Btw, we know balanced-based statistics do have their use. They can be helpful in performing what-if scenarios, for example. That's why the Trade Explorer was built with an 'Equity/Balance' toggle that allows you to flip to balance-based statistics when needed.



If you have any questions or feedback, please send us some mail!