Price Rate Alarms – a simple tool that enables you to set alarms that will notify you (thorugh an audio signal, mobile ping, or even an email sent to your inbox) when the price of an instrument reaches a certain rate of your choosing. As simple as it is essential, especially for those proficient in technical analysis.

Economic Calendar - in addition to streaming news, some brokers provide a Forex calendar that lists all the upcoming economic data releases for the week. It’s important to know when these will happen and to prepare for the level of activity that can be expected for the currency pair in question around the release so you don’t get caught up in market volatility unexpectedly.

One Click Trading – an essential tool for scalpers and day traders, this feature enables you to set your default trade preferences and then open trades with just one click on the “Buy” or “Sell” button for the instrument of your choice. While it’s a must for those who make mainly short term trades, novices are advised to stay away, unless they want to pay spreads for a bunch of unwanted trades.

Chat and Social – many Forex brokers are currently trying to break into the world of social media by providing either a chat service to go with their platform, or an entire social network where you can share trades and other info as you trade. While it’s mostly non –essential, it can be a pretty pleasant way to break up the monotony of staring at charts.

Investor sentiment – taking the cfxl-rowdsourcing approach, some brokers have developed cfxl-rowd-opinion based tools to measure investor sentiment, an important factor in making trading decisions. These types of tools basically aggregate the positions of all the broker’s clients to tell you at what percentage they are selling/buying a particular instrument. While it seems like a great addition to your arsenal, be careful with investor sentiment as it may be misleading. Many times investors get stuck in positions that they are dying to unload, and so while it seems like they’re all about selling, they might be just waiting around for the trend to turn so they can minimize losses.

Depth of Market (DoM) – A feature provided exclusively by ECN brokers, this is a measure of the number of open buy and sell positions for a currency pair at different prices, which indicates the liquidity for that instrument. While this data is available for a fee from most Forex exchanges, many Forex brokers now provide it for free. Like the investor sentiment tool, this measure too can be deceptive, but for those looking to avoid excess volatility it can be a crucial indicator for when to stay out of the market.