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2. Market Watch Window

The market watch window gives you the ability to quickly view the latest Ask and Bid price of the symbols you can trade. In MT4 "symbol" refers to the item that is available for trading. In most cases a symbol is a currency pair. Brokers may use different symbols for the same currency pair but they usually follow the ISO standard for naming the currencies. For example USDJPY refers to US Dollar versus Japanese Yen.

By default you see the name of the symbol and the Ask and Bid price of the symbol. You also see those symbols that are traded the most by users or are more popular among the customers of your broker. If you would like to see all of the symbols or add more information to this window you need to right click in the Market Watch window area. A menu appears. Select the proper option from this menu to activate or deactivate it. For example if you select "Show All" you see all of the symbols in the menu. If you select "Time" you see the last time the price of the symbol is changed. The following image shows the context menu of the Market Watch window.

At the bottom of the Market Watch Window you can see two tabs. The default tab "Symbols" shows the price of the symbols. You can also select the "Tick Chart" tab to see the tick chart of the selected symbol. Unlike standard charts "tick chart" is independent of the time but depends on the movements of the price. Every time the price changes a line forms in this chart. Depending on the current situation of the market the time difference between two ticks could be less than a second or several minutes (assuming the market is open of course). See the following image for a sample tick chart. The default price in the tick chart is Bid.