Jonathan Adest, CEO, Tradeo, London Summit 2012
Regardless of your opinion on social trading, it continues to be a hot market with an ever-increasing group of brokers entering the space. Among the early entrants was Tradeo, whose CEO, Jonathan Adest was among the participants of Forex Magnates' inaugural Elevator Pitch Presentation Session held in 2012. Launched in 2012, Tradeo provides users a cross-broker social trading experience. Partnered with a diverse set of brokers, new users could open accounts with one of the affiliated financial firms or link their existing accounts. For users, the advantage of a cross-broker platform is a larger network to follow and copy. However, maintaining multiple simultaneous broker connections, as well as managing integration with trading platforms such as MetaTrader and ActForex does bring its technological difficulties.
Following its activities as a cross-broker social trading provider, Forex Magnates learned that Tradeo is pivoting its business to become a standalone broker. The evolvement occurs as sources from the firm revealed that the firm has raised a new round of financing of $1 million from LaunchCapital, a Massachusetts headquartered venture capital firm. The fresh funding is expected to fuel both the company’s Marketing as an independent entity, as well as used for operating expenses incurred due to the firm’s pivot.
Competitive Market
Upon its launch, Tradeo will be entering an increasingly crowded market. In November of last year, during the Forex Magnates London Summit, Saxo Bank revealed its intentions of launching a social trading product centralizing its TradingFloor.com portal. Also at the Summit, TradeCrowd, a new social trading broker went live. Simultaneously, arguably the leader in the space, eToro, has been active in adding new products to their offering. In addition, while not exactly social trading, MetaQuotes is becoming a bigger player in the copytrading space with a growing list of brokers such as Alpari and Go Markets announcing that they were dropping other products in favor of MetaTrader signals. However, the emergence of the variety of companies in the social and copytrading space is based on equally growing demand from end-users for the product.
