cTrader and Trading Central Explained

Explained: cTrader and Trading Central

This Explained article will tell you who Trading Central is, what they do, what they have to do with cTrader and how you can use their financial markets analysis in your day-to-day trading.

Who or What is Trading Central?

Trading Central is a research company that provides different types of research and analysis in different formats. They are a Business to Business (B2B) company, which means they do not sell their services directly to traders like you. Their services are provided to asset managers, hedge funds and Forex and CFD brokers. You may have seen emails from your broker stating that they are powered by Trading Central, this is one of their products for brokers. Actionable content for their traders as an added value service.

Which Trading Central Products are Relevant to Me?

Trading Central provides different types of research and packaged in different formats. For example, the company provides newsletters which brokers are able to rebrand and send to their userbase. Their research is also available for plugging into different trading platforms. Trading Central provides iFrames for brokers to embed into their website or inside their trading platforms, MT4 indicators that traders can install themselves and an API feed for developers to build tools based on the Trading Centrals research.

Trading Central Ideas sent via Email
Trading Central Ideas sent via Email (Source: Trading Central)

What does Trading Central have to do with cTrader?

In January 2016 Spotware announced their native integration with Trading Central’s technical analysis research. Data from the Trading Central service is being displayed directly on cTrader Charts as an indicator called Targets. cTrader brokers who sign up with Trading Central are able to have this feature on cTrader too.

How to Use the Indicator

What cTrader has done is build a very effective and simple to use indicator inside the application. The Targets Indicator shows a target price and direction. As you hover on the Target graphic on the y Price axis a popover will appear and the support and resistance levels will present themselves. This popover is how you interact with this feature. In the popover, you can see various details which are either informative or actionable.

Targets are available for different time periods. They are intraday, which means the target is expected to be reached within the day. Short-term, mid-term and long-term are all available. Different targets are shown according to the timeframe selected. I.e. in lower timeframes like the 10-minute chart, Intraday will be shown, where is on the daily chart, short-term targets will be shown.

cTrader Targets Indicator
cTrader Targets Indicator, Powered by Trading Central
Breakdown of the Options and Information:

Info Icon in the top left: When you hover over this, you can see the complete information about the trading idea you are being shown.

Quantity: How big do you want your position to be.

Buy/Sell Button: A button showing the spot market price and the direction of the trade idea. If you click this you will enter a position with the volume quantity entered above.

Take Profit: This is the take profit level (target) associated with the trade idea. This cannot be removed at this stage but can be adjusted later.

Stop Loss: This is the Resistance Level from Trading Centrals analysis and suggested Stop Loss level. This is optional and can also be adjusted later.

Source: Attributed the source of the analysis. In this case, Trading Central.

Info Icon in the bottom right: Displays copyright information, disclaimers and warnings.

Cog Icon: Options of how the indicator is shown on the chart. You can remove the support and resistance lines to show only target prices. You can also disable the arrow (called Visualization) which points up or down on the y-axis depending on the direction of the trade idea.

One of the main differences between the cTrader version of Trading Central Targets is that it is a native integration inside the platform. This makes the way you interact with the feature more user-friendly. Also with MT4 you need to install the indicator yourself. This is more of a workaround approach and is not as clean or intuitive as cTrader.

MT4 Chart Interface with Trading Central Indicator
MT4 Chart Interface with Trading Central Indicator (Source: Trading Central)

Where can I use cTrader and Trading Central Targets

Currently, Trading Central is supported by only a few cTrader brokers, one of them being FxPro. The integration is available in both cTrader Desktop and cTrader Web. Presumably mobile is coming soon. You can find the indicator available in the cTrader Public Beta platform available from Spotware. This is just for demonstration purposes, so only a few pairs are covered. A broker offering this feature will support many more pairs.

Can I Trust Trading Central’s Research?

That’s entirely up to you. However, considering that Trading Central is trusted by dozens or even hundreds of companies, that’s usually a good sign of their reliability. Their client base is not just in the forex world, but they also provide services to banks, stockbrokers and other investment firms. Trading Central is also Regulated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the French AMF and the Hong Kong-based Securities and Futures Commission (SFC). This means they conform to strict global standards.

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