Just a day after the conclusion of the iFX Expo, and in the aftermath of announcing solid financial results for 2013, Dukascopy is in the news again as it made public today that it will be launching live trading on its binary options platform.
The brand new offering is quite different from what most current binary options traders are used to seeing. The Swiss retail Forex heavyweight has found a way to make an automatic and fair solution both for the broker and the client through integrating its regular FX spreads into the binary options price forming mechanism.
After the trade button is clicked, a 5-second countdown starts before the position is actually opened. Hence the option and the expiration period countdown will actually start after this period expires, only if the execution criteria are met. Once the button is clicked, there is no possibility to cancel or modify the binary option during the countdown.
That is to say, that when a trader is presented with a choice of whether to buy a "call" or a "put" option on a certain asset, he will have different prices for every action. Dukascopy has introduced a spread in order to minimize its risk exposure and provide reliable execution for the client.
This is quite a different approach from what the vast majority of other companies in the binary options space are doing - they normally source data from the "bid" and "ask" columns of assets and average it out to a middle point. Dukascopy is taking full advantage of its existing Forex Trading data feed and is integrating both "bid" and "ask" columns into its binary options.
It all comes at a price though - the minimum deposit for a binary options account with Dukascopy Bank is $1,000. While it is still much lower than the $5,000 requirement for a Forex trading account, it appears that the company is aiming at a high-end clientele, at least when compared to the recent average first deposit for binary options accounts. Dukascopy Bank's existing clientele will have no lower limits to transfer funds to a binary trading account.
The company's binary options offering entered beta testing back in February and the payout rates are one of the highest in the industry, coming at 90% for traditional Up or Down binary options. For now, the platform includes major USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, NZD, CAD, CHF and JPY crosses, accompanied by the USD/RUB.
