Speed is irrelevant when the infrastructure delivering it cannot be relied upon, and Argentine merchants have perfected a sense of the distinction between platforms that work under normal circumstances and those that support them when circumstances become exceptional. The difference is most important at the very time when it is the most difficult to change position, when an order is open and a transaction is gaining steam. The variation between a fulfilled order and a requote can involve real money. The brokers who have achieved a permanent loyalty in the Argentine market have tended to earn it by proving themselves reliable at those moments of extreme stress and not by being able to offer the best terms in calm times when virtually any platform can perform acceptably. Most are not ready to accept it.
MetaTrader 5 has established itself as the platform of choice to a sizeable segment of the Argentina retail dealing population not by vigorous promotion but by the type of built-up trust that is generated by stable operation through a series of market cycles. Its charting, order management interface and algorithmic trading features have become known to a generation of Argentine traders. Its high level of customization allows traders to create and launch their own indicators and automated strategies, which has been especially appealing to the technically advanced members of the population who deem mastery of the platform as a continuation of market mastery and not a matter of concern.
cTrader has developed a group of traders who value transparency in order execution above nearly anything. The depth-of-market information that is displayed on the platform, which indicates how many buy and sell orders are pending at various price points, helps them make more informed decisions regarding the timing of entry as well as the placement of orders. A number of Argentine traders who switched off MetaTrader to cTrader refer to the experience as one of moving out of driving a car with a regular rearview mirror and a panoramic view. It takes some time to get used to. Many only revert to using their regular rearview afterward.
Specialized systems created by individual brokers have received a more dubious welcome among the more practiced Argentine traders, who now know to be wary of infrastructure that they cannot themselves check, or compare to existing alternatives. It is not a technical issue. It leads to the question of whether a broker on a closed platform is sufficiently motivated to offer true best execution as opposed to making the system work in a way that benefits the house in uncertain market situations. Traders who have encountered platform outages or abnormal slippage in critical market situations on proprietary platforms will also tend to revert to open, independently audited platforms with a determination that makes the experience memorable.
The quality of mobile execution has turned into a severe differentiator because the percentage of Argentine traders transacting significant parts of their business using smartphones has increased significantly. The notion that mobile interfaces would be used to monitor, as opposed to being actual execution environments, has been replaced by the reality of trader behavior, especially among younger traders who are handling positions throughout commutes, lunch, and evening hours when they are not at their desktop stations. Sites that have gone the extra mile in regards to responsive mobile interfaces, order entry that takes extra steps, and chart rendering that can run on relatively modest hardware, have made inroads into this demographic in a way that will probably accelerate as the generational makeup of the trading community changes.
To the expanding community involved in forex trading in the varied cities and regions of Argentina, the choice of platforms has ceased to be a preference issue and more of a strategic step that determines all the further relations with the market.
Latency cutting initiatives have assumed specific importance to Argentine traders considering the geographical distance that exists between Argentina and the key financial centers where liquidity pools are located. The physical distance between Buenos Aires and servers in London or New York cannot be mitigated through software optimization, but brokers who have deployed local or regional server infrastructure have effectively shortened the round-trip time to execute orders in ways that are significant when the markets move rapidly. The traders who have experimentally run the speed of execution systematically across a variety of platforms, and not by subjective impressions, have generally concluded that these infrastructure differences are real and consequential, especially to those whose strategies require entering and exiting positions in such a way that they have precise timing. This demonstrates how forex trading in Argentina depends equally on infrastructure reliability as on analytical skill.
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