When you look around for popular trading software, most of it seems to be for Windows. What can you do if you prefer the elegance, stability and usability of a Mac? Well don’t despair or feel left out, there are many options for us Mac devotees. Read on to find out more about forex trading using a Mac.

Firstly, you can run almost any Windows software on a Mac using Parallels Desktop. This allows you to install Windows on your Mac desktop (you’ll need your own Windows XP or Vista license). Once you do this, you can install any Windows application, and run it within a virtual machine in a separate window. You can even copy and paste data between Windows and the Mac. You can readily run applications like Wealthlab or Tradestation.

The only downside (besides having to look at the ugliness that is Windows) is that you will need to install security and anti-virus software – remember that Windows (even on a Mac) is vulnerable to malware. You will need to regularly install Windows service packs.

In my experience, Windows XP applications run well under Parallels Desktop, especially version 4 (I haven’t tried Vista). My only reservation would be that you need quite a lot of memory to properly run both Windows and Mac applications side by side. If you have under 2GB of RAM, I recommend that you upgrade your system. I ran a few applications at once, and noticed a bit of a slow down on my Macbook Pro.

Also, brokers often offer a Java based trading platform which allows you to view charts and place buy and sell orders. Depending on your needs, this may be all that you require. I use the FXCM platform, and the Java version of this runs fine on my Mac. You may need to install the Java runtime, but this is quite painless. Brokers sometimes also offer a web based version of their trading platform. Whilst this is not preferred (the Java version is usually faster), it is another option. If you want to use a web based platform, I suggest that you run it using Firefox rather than Safari. Firefox on the Mac offers very good support for web applications.

My favourite native Mac application for trading is Spiffy Charts. This is designed for traders who take longer term positions as it supports daily data only, not tick or high frequency data. It might not have the fancy graphic design, but it is feature rich, powerful, and best of all, free. This is available only for the Mac.

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Tags: forex trading, mac

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Trading Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.