Alfa Financials (Pty) Ltd is a South African financial company offering forex and CFDs trading. It is authorized and regulated by the South African Financial Services Board (FSB) in South Africa. The company offers its own trading terminal called Alfa Trader, which has a downloadable desktop version for Windows OS and MAC and a mobile app for iOS and Android smartphones. Clients can trade forex, Gold and Silver. Alfa Trader can be run on every PC with Windows 7 SP1, Intel Dual Core CPU, and 2 GB RAM.
The platform is constructed in four modules, which can be moved and resized. The central two of them are for the Watchlists and for Charts and the other two show the Script Navigator and the Positions.
All menus are available at the top of the platform. The appropriate buttons appear when clicking on the corresponding menu title. You can rearrange windows by placing them on the new position in the workspace.
The Watchlist module contains the instruments and 14 currency pairs are shown by default. You can add 14 more pairs available and Gold and Silver in the demo account. It is done from the Manage Symbols module available in the right-click context menu or from the Plus button above prices. You can create a new watchlist here as well. Each instrument line contains its name, bid, and ask prices and the time the quotes have been updated. You can sort the displayed instruments or group them by symbol type.
An advanced watchlist is also available and when you click on this tab, added instruments are ready to be traded. Clicking on the i-symbol shows detailed info about selected assets.
Double clicking on the Instrument name opens the Trade module. Here you enter the quantity and clicking on the buy or sell button opens long or short market order, respectively. Pending orders are placed from the Advanced section of this module. Here you can set the price of the pending order and the properties of the associated stop loss and take profit orders. There is an option to monitor the market depth. A click on the Place Order button activates the stop/limit order.
Already open positions are displayed in the Positions module, which is below the Chart module. Here they can be closed or modified. A pie-chart of the used margin is visualized to the left. Unrealized profit/loss is shown here as well. Open positions and associated orders are shown into the chart as lines.
The Chart module is at the central part of the workspace. Price buttons are displayed into it, so you can place orders directly from here. Chart types include lines, candles, and bars. You can select time frames from one minute up to one day, including ticks. Zooming can be done by the dedicated buttons or by the mouse scroll wheel. There are a lot of graphical objects such as different types of lines, geometric shapes, and Fibonacci retracement tools. Near 80 technical indicators are available from the Indicators menu.
You can edit associated stop loss and take profit orders directly from the chart by dragging and dropping their lines to the desired price level.
Generally, the platform is intuitive but too complicated. There are some tools for automated trading, which will be appreciated by fans. However, they would probably prefer the MetaTrader 4 platform, which the company does not offer. The spreads of the instruments (for the demo version) are fixed (although they are relatively wide) regardless of the market volatility.
