Forex traders in the retail investor market tend to seek a "holy grail" solution to the challenge and stress of being a good forex trader. Forex trading software offers a solution to trader"s woes by making it very simple to generate signals and to use technical analysis of the market in order to find trends and place trades.
Forex signals software is quite rare to find. However, there are some good forex trading softwares out there that will automate the process of generating your own signals as best as possible. The idea of this type of software is to input some data in to the software and allow the software to calculate whether or not for that particular timeframe and pair there is a viable entry in to a trade based on a probability algorithm.
Online forex trading with a broker very often will come with forex trading software that allows basic charting across multiple timeframes with indicators used for technical analysis such as Moving averages, ADX, MACD and Bollinger Bands. This type of software varies in it"s ease of use and functionality. It is of course possible to run a forex broker platform in order to place trades alongside a separate charting package if the charting package has preferred functionality, either on the same computer or a separate computer.
The neccessity of having a forex trading software such as that which generates signals "on the fly" depends on the trading style of the investor. If you are requiring perspective of such a software - if it helps in making decisions in the short and long term - then of course it is going to be beneficial to own such a software, especially if it is low cost. If a trading plan and strategy does not require signals to be generated artificially by a software then such a software may not be needed.
It is neccessary these days to have a forex software in order to execute trades. Opening, closing, setting of stop loss and limit orders are fairly straightforward to do using a forex trading software provided by your forex broker. However trades can still be placed by phone, but it is going to be less accurate and reliable than using the software in most cases because of the time to get through to the broker and get a quote through the third party.
Forex software that allows the user to generate their own signals and actually have a software tell them whether or not a currency pair is likely to be an opportunity to go long or short is more interesting. For example, if you have a trade plan where you have identified the formation of a base and the market is testing resistance plus there is divergence all indicating a long, a signal saying that the short and long term outlook of that pair according to the forex probability software is also long will give you that much more confidence to place the trade and believe in your decision if you require this kind of back up.