History and new developments

Since 1996, when retail forex trading was introduced, several brokers who lacked the sufficient tools developed their own trading platforms tailored specifically to their needs. These platforms were good enough at the time but required constant investments in R&D and its development cost too much. This was the first wave.

The second wave was in the early 2000s: several software companies entered the retail forex trading market by launching their own versions of trading platforms. Typically these versions were cumbersome for both front-end users (retail traders) and back-end users (retail brokers) due to the misunderstanding of the developers about the forex market and also because of the insufficient programming tools/languages at the time. Simultaneously most of the retail brokers kept using and developing their own systems as they waited for better platforms which were yet to be developed.

There are currently few to no brokers which were part of the first wave trading systems. By now most of the first wave brokers have either vanished, merged or progressed to the second wave trading platforms – the most common example of which is Metaquotes.