We just re-launched the forex brokers comparison tool. Flo built this tool last year but we had some technical problems which are now fixed.
As every webmasters I wanted to add a fx brokers comparison section on my website but I didn’t want to update the data manually. I also didn’t want to use broker’s API. Our target was to reproduce exactly what I see on the trading platform. We found only one solution: OCR -Optical Character Recognition-
The process is quite simple but it’s not the easiest way. We have a dedicated computer with the trading platforms, we make a screen shot every ten seconds, we send the picture to our server and the OCR translates the picture to text.
We had technical problems on each step.
- Our office is not as big as fxstreet’s, I had to find a place to put the computer with 2 screens. Don’t laugh, it was a really problem.
- We search and find a wonderful software to make the screen shot: SnagIt.
- SnagIt can send the picture with FTP but we encountered several problems. If our server cuts the communication, SnagIt stops the process. I use “Cobian Backup” to send the files.
- Images are processed to remove unnecessary parts. The OCR system is developed in C. It took several months to be optimized.
And now I have a great tool to compare the price and the spread offered by forex brokers. To see how the price and the spread moves during the news. And finally I want to compare the bid/ask of each brokers to see if I can find an indicator for my personal trading.
If you are a broker and if you want to be included in this tool, I would be very pleased to have a real account (even without money)…
You can find similar tools on the Internet but never as detailled:
- Mataf – the best
- FXIntel – Not bad but useless for trading
- Oanda – a marketing tool… the spread during the news release is the most interesting
Forex brokers comparison
fxintel.com “useless for trading”?? I beg to differ! I use it all the time to make sure the current spread I’m paying is in-line with the competition.
Nice work with the OCR, quite a feat! The charts on our site can be replicated to look similar to yours, simply change the ‘Display: spread’ toggle switch to “bid” or “ask”.
Hi Brian,
FxIntel is the most complete tool to compare spreads. But I don’t need to compare spreads when I have a trading account. It’s too late.
I think we can use this tool to build an indicator to find intraday entry and exit point by comparing bid and ask.
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Using OCR is hard work, but provides unbiased results. I’ll see how spreads move on the Fed decision, very soon.