WordPress has become arguably one of the most used interfaces for web design today, especially due to the fact that it is no longer just for blogs. WordPress website functionality is significantly extended using themes and plugins. This has allowed WordPress to drastically change how many Continue reading
Global foreign exchange (forex) currency trading is one of the fastest-growing uses for the current generation of mobile devices that are Wi-Fi and 3G or 4G capable, such as iPad, iPhone, Windows-based tablets and smart phones and Android devices.
This growth is logical since the freedom to trade currency pairs without being tethered to a desktop computer is very appealing.
Most forex traders are aware that the amount of time spent managing a trade is pretty minimal. Mobile trading permits the trader to monitor the market, enter and exit trades and be alerted of significant market developments, all while engaging in other tasks that need to be performed.
Many brokers offer mobile applications and many other forex market participants are involved in some way.
This article will take a brief look at one source of mobile forex information, WordPress.org, and provide an outline of its mobile trading plug-ins.
WordPress began in 2003 as a way, in their words, “… To enhance the typography of everyday writing…”
Precisely what that means eludes me, but they must do something right, because at this time, they claim to be, “The largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world…”
Well, blogs are within my comprehension, at least nominally, so that could be considered progress.
As a forex trader, two things that immediately caught my eye is that WordPress is free (what forex trader doesn’t love free stuff?) and that WordPress offers plug-ins to facilitate mobile trading.
It would appear that WordPress currently has four plug-ins.
Here is a brief description for each of them, as well as a few comments.
Exchange Rate Table
This one can display a table of the exchange rates for any of over 200 world currencies. It is customizable with regard to format and color and is updated daily with currency data from banks and governments. There are options that allow the user to format a table that takes the selected currency and compares it to six other world currencies, giving either the currency code, country name or currency name. This is accomplished by using the plug-in’s administrative panel to choose currency, label type, table length, header and background color.
For mobile traders with more screen real estate, a longer table can be displayed.
My only comment regarding this plug-in is that it seems very useful if you’re content with daily exchange rate updates. This may be a good tool for someone who wants to check on rates as a part of their planning for their next training session.
EagleEye Analyst
This plug-in enables automatic publishing to blogs on a daily basis. It supports three languages: English, Russian and Arabic. It provides a glimpse of short-term technical elements. The WordPress site lists 726 downloads since September of 2010, so it would seem that many mobile forex traders and bloggers have not availed themselves of this plug-in at this point in time.
Again, my comment is that end of day data is suitable for the long-term trader, but forex traders know that an hour is an eternity for currency pair prices. Someone posting any sort of forex blog could certainly appreciate this application that updates the EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDCHF and USDJPY daily.
EagleEye Widget
The EagleEye widget is designed to provide daily and hourly forex analysis and provide signals to the user. It gives recommendations regarding market reversals and pattern formation. This can be in the form of text alerts or arrow-shaped icons that indicate bullish, bearish or neutral market sentiment. It supports multiple languages. Which currency pairs to track can be selected from a drop down list and EagleEye will display price charts and supply hourly alerts.
This widget supplies data for four major currency pairs and also gold and silver.
The EagleEye widget is closer to what I would expect from a mobile app. Used in conjunction with a real-time broker app, anyone who wants analysis without the effort of doing it themselves might benefit from this widget.
FxWidget
This plug-in is very specialized. It is designed to display official European Central Bank (ECB) rates for the euro as compared to 33 other currencies. The rates are updated daily.
This is the oldest of the four plug-ins, and judging by the number of downloads, the least popular.
The most useful aspect of FxWidget is that it supplies rates from the European Central Bank. Comparing these rates with the ones supplied by your broker may provide some eye-opening insights.
Conclusion
Mobile forex trading is experiencing explosive, exponential growth.
New apps are being offered on a daily basis.
Trying to stay current with the latest developments seems at times to be similar to painting the Golden Gate Bridge or washing the windows on the Empire State Building. No sooner do you get done than you have to start all over again.
Given the rapidity with which powerful mobile technology has been adopted, it will be very interesting to observe future developments in mobile forex trading.
Imagine reading a great blog entry about all of the wonderful, fascinating, exciting things there are to do in London, Jakarta, or Santiago- but having no idea how much any of it costs.
Just because a dollar is worth a certain number of euros today doesn’t mean it will be worth the same tomorrow. The value of the dollar in the global market is an important part of any travel consideration.If you live in New York and want to travel to Chicago, you only have to do a little research to find out how much a city bus ride or a cup of coffee costs in your destination. With just a few of facts like that, you can create a pretty clear idea of how much money you’ll need to see, hear, and taste everything you want to experience in the Windy City. But if you live in New York and want to travel to Tokyo, things get a little more complicated. You might be able to find out that a cup of coffee in Toyko costs about 350 yen, but what does that even mean?
That’s where a forex broker, or the foreign exchange market, comes in. Forex trading is the market used to trade global currencies. If you want to know what 350 yen translates to in the dollars you currently have in your pocket, you need to consider a bunch of factors, like the relative strength of the U.S. and Japanese economies, recent trends in their stock markets, political stability, and even recent news events. Each of these factors change on a continuous basis, so the exchange rate also changes constantly. Luckily, it’s easy to bypass all of those complicated parameters and just find out how many yen each of your dollars is worth directly. Thanks to the Internet, we can find this information with just a quick web search.
And with the right WordPress plugin, we wouldn’t even have to search.
WordPress is the open source platform that powers thousands of blogs across the Internet. You’ve probably seen a blog that had some interesting feature in the sidebar, like a list of the most recent comments posted by visitors to the site. Something like that is often run by a plugin, which is a little bit of code added on to the main WordPress system that automatically does something useful or interesting (like list all the most recent comments) with little to no effort on the part of the blog’s author.
Let’s look back on our earlier example. Before we started wondering how much coffee our dollar bill would buy us in the world’s major cities, we were reading some really interesting travel blogs. Many of those blogs were probably powered by WordPress, and nearly all of them used plugins. Imagine reading that great travel blog about all the awesome things to do in Tokyo. But this time, the sidebar doesn’t show all the most recent comments to the site. Instead, it shows the exchange rate between dollars and yen. A WordPress plugin can do almost anything its creator can dream up. Maybe this plugin shows a list of the most commonly traded currencies. Maybe it automatically detects the country you are reading about from the text of the blog entry and bumps that exchange rate to the top of the list. Maybe it even automatically updates the typical “cost of living” benchmarks, like the cost of that cup of coffee, or a newspaper, or the average nightly hotel cost. It might even do something even more useful and creative. With features like this, a blog reader wouldn’t even have to navigate away from the page to get all of the information they need, and the blog author wouldn’t need to constantly write about the exchange market either.
One of the great things about WordPress plugins is that they are community-supported, which means they are conceived of and created by developers who aren’t officially affiliated with WordPress. They are usually bloggers themselves who know a little programming and have thought of a cool feature they wish they could implement in their blogs. Anyone can create a WordPress plugin if they just have a good idea and the right programming knowledge. Forex plugins could open a whole new world of exploration for millions of people and encourage international trade and travel. If you’re a WordPress developer, what are you waiting for? Think of the dynamic possibilities of coding for a feature which updates constantly. If you’re not a WordPress developer, go find one and tell them to get on it. Or if you’re even more ambitious, hit the books and become a developer yourself.
A myriad of travel blogs excite and fascinate readers across the globe. They encourage readers to see the world and travel to new and exotic places. Anything that can bring those readers another step closer to getting off the computer and onto a plane would not only enrich their lives, but bring more cross-cultural understanding to a conflicted world.
