The ever-advancing competition within the social and copy trading segment of an already highly contested retail FX industry has resulted in a number of technology firms resorting to enter into partnerships with specialist providers, as well as attempting to diversify their offerings to further their reach beyond what has now become a fiercely crowded business sector.
Nir Yaffe, VP Professional Services,
CorrSight
Today, real-time Analytics vendor CorrSight announced a partnership with Leverate in order to provide a new copy trading service to clients of brokers who currently use the Sirix HTML5 platform, and indeed new brokers who adopt it.
Entering the market under the designation of Trade Like Me, the service filters master traders based on their account history and displays only those who have consistently achieved superb performance, with limited drawdown, excellent Risk Management , and of course, the best P&L. This is done by applying a set of unique algorithms developed by CorrSight. According to CorrSight, each user is matched with appropriate masters, and clients can choose to copy trades by asset, trading type and trading time, all in real-time.
Brokers wishing to adopt the service are, in keeping with CorrSight's confirmation to Forex Magnates today, able to capitalize it in a few ways, ranging from minimal spread to paying a fixed price for the service.
Sirix Goes Algo
In terms of functionality and compatibility, the existing modus operandi of Leverate's Sirix Social Community continues, with the addition of CorrSight's algorithms which aim to provide users with the ability to match their own trading platforms to other master traders in order to find similar patterns, adding strength to the current dynamic among other industry participants who are demonstrating a preference toward supporting many trading platforms on a unified network.
A number of social trading providers had built solid relationships with brokers which based their offering around the MetaTrader 4 platform over a substantial period of time, until mid- 2013 when MetaQuotes issued warnings with the intent of alienating brokers from four established social and copy trading companies. This spearheaded a move in the direction of platform agnosticism, in which the emphasis has now shifted toward the encouragement of traders toward being part of a widespread social trading network, rather than being viewed by brokers who were already saddled with MetaTrader 4 as an ancillary method of assisting the retention and engagement of clients.
Indeed, in a discussion today which took place on the Forex Magnates Meet The Experts panel, Leon Yohai, CEO of stalwart social trading company ZuluTrade, was met with a question relating to how a broker could be chosen according to his support for auto-trading. Mr. Yohai reinforced the matter that, "Support regarding auto-trading is taken care by the service providers and not the brokers themselves", this in itself making for a relatively easy shift toward completely open platforms and social networks spanning several brokers.
Nir Yaffe, CorrSight's VP of Professional Services, as well as being one of the company's co-founders, today spoke to Forex Magnates to provide his view on the direction which copy trading is taking: "I think that there is a trend for the platform providers to expand their services to social trading and provide more value to their customers," concurred Mr. Yaffe.
"Significant examples are MetaQuotes with their new signal/copy service and Sirix social service. In addition we are seeing the independent social players like Tradeo (eToro model) become brokers with proprietary platform. Some others are purchased by brokers like Currensee by OANDA."
When considering whether brokers may wish to shift away from the external social trading platforms such as Tradency and ZuluTrade, toward completely broker-neutral and platform neutral networks whereby all traders from all brokers/networks are able to show their strategies, Mr. Nir explained that, "Other social platform players will continue to improve their capabilities such as Tradency and ZuluTrade to preserve their positioning as leading solution providers."
"We believe that open-source platforms or plug-ins will have more significant weight in general and in the social trading arena specifically," is Mr. Yaffe's line of thinking.
Diversity A Top Priority
In terms of the expected reception which Trade Like Me is likely to gain, Mr. Yaffe considers that, "The target audience for the Trade Like Me is the social trading providers from all of the diversity above who want to enrich the end user social experience."
"Our solution is tailored for each trader to match the best master, which trades similarly to the trader. For example, traders that trade on EURJPY and GBPJPY mainly can select highly ranked masters that are focused on those instruments and trade at the same times and/or duration, and it is all done in real-time by using out sophisticated analytic algorithms," stated Mr. Yaffe.
Whilst a crossroads was reached in 2013 by MetaQuotes' onslaught against the copy and social trading establishment, providers who arrived at that crossroads faced a one-way street ahead due to the ability for all third party software firms, except for social trading and copy trading vendors, being able to submit their systems to MetaQuotes for vetting and subsequent offering via the company's third party software marketplace.
This heralded the direction toward such companies broadening their horizons by moving toward open source solutions and platform-neutral social networks, something which, with the emergence of a number of recent entrants, appears to have become more than just a trend.
