Frederick Potter 
The decision of which trading platform to choose was very easy. To the majority of Indian retail investors a decade ago it represented a choice of a few local brokers that gave access to the NSE or BSE whose interfaces were functional instead of aesthetic. That world is much different and the variety of platforms that are competing to capture the attention of Indian traders is a testament to the extent to which the market has grown and evolved.
MetaTrader 4 has also retained a dedicated base of customers, especially those who grew up in the forex markets and developed their strategy based on its charting capabilities and automated trading. The platform is not aesthetically pleasing according to the standards of modernism, yet its functionality and the sheer amount of community-created indicators and professional consultants make it sticky. A Jaipur trader who has concentrated three years on perfecting an algorithmic strategy on the MT4 would not drop it just because there is a new interface.
A different story is usually told by the younger traders. People who got into markets via stock trading applications on their phones are often confused by the interface of the MT4 and are frustrated by the mobile version of the platform. In this segment, mobile-first platforms such as cTrader and proprietary broker platforms have become the new environment of choice. The move towards CFD trading by these users is likely to occur within platforms that they already feel at ease with and that is why brokers who have invested in interface design continue to win over this group.
Speed of execution is one of the things that make the difference between an amateur and a professional. Slippage and order fill quality are closely observed by traders engaging in short-term trading in volatile products such as crude oil or currency pairs. Platforms that are supported by ECN infrastructure are generally better in such situations and word spreads quickly among Indian trading communities when a certain broker or platform is regularly able to cleanly fill whenever a high impact news event occurs. One negative incident when making an announcement by the Reserve Bank of India has even made some traders to change platforms completely.
The conversation has also been altered by the social and copy trading layer. Platforms enabling less experienced players to imitate the positions of certified traders have drawn a certain kind of Indian investor, usually a person with disposable income and market interest but insufficient time to build up analytical skills on their own. Critics of this model include traders who claim that it produces passive subjects who never get to learn how to deal with risks on their own. Nevertheless, the number of volumes that pass through copy trading facilities on platforms such as eToro is an indication that the attraction is real and increasing.
The underrated differentiator is customer support. The quality of the support team of a broker is immediately relevant when a withdrawal is delayed or the execution of a position does not occur correctly. Indian traders have also observed that sites that have special support desks that operate within the Indian Standard Time zone and who have employees who can clearly speak the English language deal with complaints much better than those who direct all their inquiries to the European working hours. This is an operational detail that has impacted platform loyalty more than most marketing campaigns.What the present landscape portrays is a trading population that is far beyond beginner status. In India, CFD trading is no longer determined by the small players trying to experiment with small deposits. The platforms that are gaining traction are those which view their Indian users as refined participants, with deep liquidity, clear fee frameworks and offering features that reflect the aspirations of a retail trading community that is by all available metrics increasingly serious by the month.