MultiCharts is an award-winning trading platform that can be used for charting, back testing and automated trading across multiple brokers. It has an abundance of features and functionalities making it one of the top trading software’s when it comes to advanced market analysis features for both beginner and expert traders alike. There is so much possibilites with this charting package, I think everyone will find something useful. In this MultiCharts Review, we will cover in detail what it is and how it works, to help you decide if you would find it beneficial to implement MultiCharts within your daily trading routine. Now without further ado, lets get stuck right into it!
What is MultiCharts?
The MultiCharts platform is a Windows-based application which is designed, sold and distributed by MultiCharts, LLC. The company is based in Columbus, Ohio, in the United States. The name MultiCharts was used to reflect the freedom to work the way you like, without the limitations from previous charting platforms.
MultiCharts is an electronic trading platform and technical analysis software for conducting in-depth analysis of the financial markets and performing trade execution. It implements advanced market analysis features for expert traders whilst being user-friendly enough to support beginner traders.
Why choose MultiCharts?
MultiCharts’ advantage is based on building robust trading strategies, accurate market data with minimal delivery time, order execution within milliseconds, and competitive transaction fees. With tools such as high-definition charting, technical indicators, back testing, and strategy execution, everything you need is at your fingertips.
MultiCharts Features
Whether you are scalping, day trading, swing trading or investing for the long term, MultiCharts has a vast array of features that can help you to achieve your individual trading goals, whatever they may be.
There are high-definition charting, built-in indicators and strategies, one-click trading from chart and depth of market pricing (DOM), high-precision back testing, brute-force and genetic optimization, automated execution and support for EasyLanguage scripts are all key tools at your disposal.
Some of the key MultiCharts features include:
- Self-Adaptive strategies optimize inputs while auto-trading
- Fail-Watch predictive system warns of possible issues
- Track back test, forward-test, and live orders in one place
Now, let us take a more detailed look at the various features below.
Chart Analysis
Chart Analysis is at the core of what MultiCharts has to offer. They provide complete and informative charting in order to help traders make the right choice. In MultiCharts, you can easily perform multi time frame analysis without cumbersome extras, such as custom DLLs and global variables. This way you can see the small details in each chart along with the bigger picture.
Volume Analysis
The importance of volume analysis cannot be underestimated. Paying attention to volume can make the crucial difference in understanding how the market will move. MultiCharts have tools that are designed to help you understand not only how much was bought but at which prices activity was the highest, and whether there are more buyers than sellers.
The Volume Profile is a vital tool that shows the most traded prices for a particular time period. It plots volume as a histogram on the price bar, so you can see the levels where you need them.
Chart Types
Professional technical analysis requires that you have professional tools at your disposal. MultiCharts has both regular and exotic chart types to meet your individual needs. Each chart type offers a different perspective on the market — so you can make informed decisions.
Drawing Tools
There are a broad range of intelligent drawing tools available. These tools allow you to focus on trends, support and resistance, gaps, pivots, triangles, and other price patterns.
Trend Lines, Andrews’ Pitchfork, Fibonacci Arcs, Gann Fans, and other studies can be easily drawn with just a mouse click.
Technical Analysis Ideas
MultiCharts gives you advanced analysis tools. There are a broad range of indicators, chart types, drawing tools, and trading strategies are ready for your immediate use. They have also included hundreds of free indicators and strategies.
You can perform chart analysis using over 100+ popular indicators such as the moving average envelopes, Bollinger bands, relative strength index, stochastics, MACD and many more.
EasyLanguage-Friendly
EasyLanguage is a proprietary programming language that was developed by TradeStation and built into its electronic trading platform. It is used to create custom indicators for financial charts and also to create algorithmic trading strategies for the markets.
MultiCharts is EasyLanguage Friendly but it is not possible to achieve 100% compatibility so please be aware that there are some limitations.
In saying that, it is estimated that up to 99% of your EasyLanguage strategies and indicators will work without any changes, and your existing studies will get compiled. The code will even produce the same results that you see in TradeStation.
Market Scanner
The market scanner lets you scan all securities one-by-one with a specified frequency and at the same time monitor hundreds of selected instruments in real-time. It has multi-core support and 64-bit architecture making this particular Market Scanner one of the most powerful tools for finding trading opportunities.
Market Data Playback
Market replay can be a great way to learn about trading online without risking real money. MultiCharts allows tick-by-tick replay which recreates a complete real-time market picture for practising your trading strategies with as much accuracy as possible.
This feature is especially important for discretionary traders who use price patterns and other methods, which are difficult to incorporate into trading models and strategy trading.
Back Testing
MultiCharts supports back testing so that you can run your automated trading strategies over historical data to get a rough idea of how it may have performed historically. This also allows you to test your strategy to make sure it works as expected.
Keep in mind, back test results are by no means any indication of future performance. Please be aware of all the significant risks involved with trading online before you start using any manual or automated system.
Strategy Development
MultiCharts offers you PowerLanguage that is an evolution of EasyLanguage. It allows the creation of simple strategies without requiring any special education. Simply looking at the built-in scripts is enough to understand the logic and begin programming.
If a strategy requires complicated logic and thousands of lines of code, then PowerLanguage has practically everything you need. If you need something that is not available, then a DLL in any other programming language may be used.
Trading System Analysis
MultiCharts’ strategy performance report is a powerful tool used by CTAs and regular traders for evaluating strategies. At your fingertips, you have more than 200 performance measurements available.
Some of the most useful ones are located in strategy performance summary, performance ratios, time analysis, list of trades, total trade analysis, outliers, run-up and drawdown, trade series analysis and periodic analysis.
Trading Strategy Optimization
A trading strategy is created by taking trading concepts, ideas and observations about historical market behaviour and implementing them into a trading system.
The aim of any optimization is to adjust one’s trading system in an attempt to make it more effective. Strategy optimization is searching for optimum parameters for predefined criteria.
By testing a range of strategy input values, optimization selects values that correspond to optimal strategy performance based on historical data. As a result, a trader gets many possible input combinations to find ones that result in the best performance.
I think that it is important to mention the risks of over-optimization. This basically means that we take a historical data set from a particular instrument, timeframe and date range, then optimize a random bunch of settings to see what settings nest fit the data. This often leads to “curve-fitting” where the settings are not based on any trading strategy logic but just over optimized for the data that was provided.
To try and avoid this, one can back test a trading strategy over multiple instruments and timeframes. We can also conduct robustness tests such as monte carlo analysis, walk forward testing and use out of data samples.
Walk Forward Testing
Walk Forward Optimization is an optimization process that addresses the issue of curve fitting in strategy development. What makes walk forward testing different from other optimization methods is the unique multi-step approach to strategy testing.
The essence and the main advantage of Walk Forward testing is that it combines optimization and back testing. During the process, optimal inputs are tested against real market conditions to see how they would perform. Multiple WFO tests help to prove or disprove the validity of your trading system.
Automated Trading
MultiCharts support automated trading strategies. You can develop and run trading robots on the platform. Orders generated by a trading strategy in MultiCharts are sent directly to the broker’s server. Then the broker responds with a message about the order status, and you can see on your chart if the trade was successful.
Portfolio Trader
Portfolio Trader is an advanced functionality to simulate and auto trade entire portfolios, which can contain 100’s of stocks, futures, and other instruments.
Portfolio back testing means applying one or more strategies to many instruments at once — simulating on historical data and gauging performance as if all symbols were traded with these strategies. Different symbols can even have different resolutions during the testing: 1 tick, 3 minutes, 9 days or others.
Visual Trading
Visual price levels are much more intuitive than the traditional way of typing in exact orders and prices. You can easily drag-and-drop orders on the price level you want and quickly adjust them by dragging them around.
Chart Trading
MultiCharts support directly trading from the charts. Trading from a chart is one of the most popular approaches by discretionary traders as you can see price movements along with your indicators, and recognize where appropriate levels will be for price action.
Visual chart trading helps users to keep pace with their needs and they can intuitively drag and drop orders onto the charts. It can always be moved to another level if desired. Entire entry and/or exit strategies, like single orders, may also be dropped onto a chart.
Trade Bar
The Trade Bar is a standard order entry method that’s been around since beginning of electronic trading. It’s simple and precise — type in the exact price, choose the order type and buy or sell. The Trade bar has tabs, one for each broker profile created. A key benefit is that you can trade through many brokers at the same time.
Order and Position Tracker
This window gives a detailed summary of orders, positions and accounts across all brokers being used for trading. Cancel or modify pending orders, or even flatten entire positions directly from this window. All information is in one convenient place – it can be sorted and filtered to zoom in on needed details. This information can also be exported into Excel for further analysis.
Depth of Market (DOM)
This industry-standard tool shows market depth, volume profile and provides one-click trading. MultiCharts’ DOM displays ten price levels each way and allows entry and exit automation directly in the DOM window. See volume at different prices to analyse how supply and demand are interacting and where prices may go.
Symbol Mapping
Sometimes data feeds and brokers have different names for the same symbol — and orders can get rejected for incorrect symbol reference. In other programs seeing a chart doesn’t mean you can trade from it, but in MultiCharts it’s always possible. Trade any symbol from any chart with symbol mapping. MultiCharts defines how an order will appear to a broker, so it is possible to use any combination of data feeds and brokers.
Data Management
MultiCharts has a local data management and storage system called QuoteManager. It collects and locally stores all of the data received from the data feeds. QuoteManager handles all aspects of data maintenance and offers convenient database and management features for your symbols.
Time and Sales
Tape reading has been successfully used by traders since the middle of the 19th century. Time and Sales shows at which price a trade was filled – at bid, ask or between them. Also, it displays the amount of volume that each trade includes. This information tells you whether there are currently more buyers or sellers, and also what prices they are buying and selling at.
Global Hotkeys
Hotkeys, which is a short name for keyboard shortcuts, is a must-have tool for any trader for reacting quickly to market changes. It’s generally a lot faster to press a couple of buttons then to navigate with your mouse, and hotkeys are designed to let you perform just about any action in MultiCharts. You can apply sets of indicators, place orders and even do custom actions by pressing two buttons.
Supported Data Feeds
Most traders subscribe to a real-time data feed from a data vendor, because they need to get intraday data. MultiCharts supports many different data providers and more are added with each new release. You have complete freedom of choice — you can use one, two, or several data sources at the same time. Keep in mind, that each data vendor provides different historical data, so choose the one that suits your needs.
Forex Board
The forex market is a highly volatile and liquid market, so traders need to act quickly and with precision. MultiCharts Forex Board is intended to simplify the trading process — such as placing buy or sell orders just with one click. Visualize the forex quotes to interact with the current market more efficiently. This functionality is especially useful for traders whose trading logic is based on opening / closing a lot of orders in a short period of time.
MultiCharts Add-ons
MultiCharts comes with over 280 pre-built indicators, signals and drawing tools. In addition to this, MultiCharts includes unique add-on indicators from third-party companies. These studies are proprietary and their algorithms are not freely accessible, but they are designed to help you make informed trading decisions.
On the website, you will find a great range of specialized, third-party commercial products that can be integrated seamlessly within the MultiCharts trading platform.
MultiCharts Brokers
MultiCharts supports a wide range of different brokers and data feeds, with more being added with each new version that they release. This is great as it means you are not tied to a specific broker or data feed, given the user more freedom of choice. They do not have any specific broker requirement for you to start using the MultiCharts software. You can even switch between several different brokers if you wish.
Once you have chosen your supported broker such as Oanda, Binance, Tickmill, SAXO or Dukascopy, you can then choose your trading method, test it, and start trading. It has great flexibility in that sense. There is a frequently updated list of brokers available on the MultiCharts website.
MultiCharts Awards
MultiCharts has won numerus awards for their trading platform, including the Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities Readers’ Choice Award and the T2W best software for forex traders.
I always feel more comfortable using a company that has won awards and has positive reviews from respected outlets. The fact they have also been around for so many years shows me that they are an established company that should have learned plenty and evolved a lot over the years.
Download MultiCharts
You can download the latest official release of MultiCharts free of charge from the official website. Once you have the platform installed, there is an integrated version checker to make sure that you always know if you have the latest version. If not, you can simply download and update it directly from within the MultiCharts platform.
MultiCharts Packages & Prices
There are a variety of MultiCharts packages to choose from, each carefully designed to meet the different needs of traders and investors alike. The main difference between each package is the price. The longer you subscribe for, the more discount you can get.
You can choose between the following MultiCharts packages:
- 1-month ($97 per month)
- 3-months $267 ($89 per month)
- 1-year $797 ($66 per month)
- Lifetime $1,497
- 30-day Free Trial
MultiCharts
- MultiCharts trading platform
- Free FX data for 1 year
- Free Live Chat and email technical support
- Free major and minor version upgrades
- Fast online environment-friendly delivery
MultiCharts PRO
- Regular MultiCharts package
- Dedicated personal technical support line
- Bloomberg data feed plugin
Free Trial
All packages include a free trial which can be a great way to familiarise yourself with the MultiCharts platform to see if it is something you find beneficial and would like to purchase and use for the long term.
Payments
MultiCharts accept card payments, wire transfer, PayPal, and some other popular payment methods. You should receive the MultiCharts instructions for installation via e-mail within 24 hours after the payment.
They will even offer a discount if you switch from a competing charting software package. You can contact support for more info on this promotion.
They do not offer any refunds but you can always take advantage of the 30-day free trial to see if MultiCharts meets your needs before committing to a subscription. You can cancel your subscription at any time.
Convert License
You do not need to purchase a new license if you decide that you want to use C# instead of EasyLanguage, or vice versa. You can use the convenient License Conversion option they provide for a one-time switch between MultiCharts and MultiCharts .NET, costing $200.
Advanced Strategy Pack
If you have the lifetime license, you can add the advanced strategy pack (ASP) for $500. The ASP includes some extra features such as:
- Portfolio Trader
- Matrix Optimization
- Walk-Forward Optimization
- Self-Adaptive Trading
- Volume Profile Drawing
- Historical Data Downloader with Scheduler
- Strategy Orders Monitor
- Fast Automated Order Execution Switch
Free Forex Data
The MultiCharts lifetime license includes free forex data for 1-year. The forex data comes directly from their FX servers and there are 2 years of historical tick data, 11 years of minute and daily bars (ask and bid values), covering 30+ major FX currency pairs.
License
A single license may be used by its owner on one computer at a time, the company reserve the right to cancel your license if this rule is violated. However, they do offer special volume-discounted pricing models and customization services.
Updates
The developers are continually working on improving MultiCharts. As trading technology advances, so do the capabilities of trading platforms. Thankfully, you do not need to re-subscribe every time as MultiCharts includes all future software upgrades free of charge to existing users.
About MultiCharts
In 1999, Dennis Globa and his friends grew an interest in forex trading. There primary concern was to combine third-party historical data with real-time data
Back then, algorithmic trading was only in its infancy, with a limited choice of platforms and functionalities. The majority of technical analysis platforms wanted to monopolise the market share which was detrimental to what tasks users could complete and what they were capable of achieving through them. You would have had to create a work around to do things that charting platform do with relative ease these days.
These limitations from some of the most popular trading platform led Globa and his team to create a platform that removed these limitations and instead, had the best interest of its users in mind.
This is what they did in 2005 when MultiCharts was developed. It has since grown into one of the most respectable charting platforms in the online financial markets.
Traders in over 39 countries around the world use MultiCharts. The company has development offices which are located in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, and they also have authorized representatives in Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan.
MultiCharts Support
MultiCharts offers support via an online help section with a range of tutorial videos and guides that cover everything you need to know in order to get started with the platform. If you have any specific questions, the MultiCharts support team will be happy to offer assistance. They can be reached via telephone and email.
MultiCharts Conclusion
I personally think that it is imperative to have the right trading platform to trade forex, stocks, commodities, cryptocurrencies, futures or any other financial market for that matter. The right trading platform can help to give you an edge in today’s competitive markets.
When it comes to charting platforms, MultiCharts is certainly worth mentioning in the conversation along with the likes of the industry leading TradingView and Autochartist platforms.
It has been around for years and contains a plethora of features and functionalities to ensure that traders and investors of all experience levels can conduct thorough in-depth market analysis in a convenient and user-friendly manner.
If you would like to find out more about MultiCharts or to start a free trial, please feel free to visit the official website by using the link below.
MultiCharts
Free Trial
Pros
- Advanced charting platform
- Detailed market analysis
- Tons of features
- Multiple brokers to choose from
- Back testing & forward testing
- Strategy optimization
- Fully customisable charting package
- Indepth technical analysis
- Portfolio Trader
- Historical Data Downloader
Cons
- Takes some time to learn
- Overwhelming range of features
- Limited broker integration
Self-confessed Forex Geek spending my days researching and testing everything forex related. I have many years of experience in the forex industry having reviewed thousands of forex robots, brokers, strategies, courses and more. I share my knowledge with you for free to help you learn more about the crazy world of forex trading! Read more about me.
