Recently Gold-i announced a partnership with Swissrisk Partners to offer a unique pricing index for Smart Live Markets. This announcement caught our attention for several reasons, so we reached out to Paul Hare, Director of Trading at Smart Live Markets and Tom Higgins, CEO of Gold-i.
Smart Live Markets is one of the first MT4 brokers that offers spread betting. The spread betting status gives a tax advantage to traders in the UK. Financial spread betting is free from capital gains tax and stamp tax. The Metatrader platform by default is a lot based system (0.1, 0.2, and so on). Spread betting clients are used to trading on a pound per point system (£1 / point, £0.10 / point and so on) with existing spread bet platforms. The conversion from lot based system to pound per point is not easy to do on an existing platform and the team at Smart Live Markets realized that they could serve a niche market by providing spread betting on the MT4 platform.
Even though Smart Live Markets was just founded in 2009, the management team is backed by experts who have worked at ODL Markets and City Index. According to Paul Hare, “Nobody offers so many markets on MetaTrader. It’s a little bit difficult through traditional methods to the get prices into the platform because they all come in from different exchanges and sources. So what we needed was some method of getting all those different instruments into MetaTrader. And the most sensible way of doing that is through a price engine, and there are a few out there...,- Swissrisk are the market leaders in that area. We partnered with Gold-i because they enabled us to connect Swissrisk and MetaTrader via their Gold-i Gate Bridge which is their niche area of expertise.”
Gold-i describes themselves as a trading systems integrator and provider of multi-asset execution using the super-low latency Gold-i Gate Bridge. Gold-i distinguishes itself from other bridge providers by supporting partial fills, partial closures, true limit orders (no Slippage ) and even Multiple Close on the Metatrader platform. According to Tom Higgins, “Smart Live Markets has a unique business model and were able to deliver a custom solution for them. The Swissrisk pricing engine is a generic pricing tool that can take pricing from multiple exchanges and vendors. The Swissrisk system has to then get those prices as fast as possible into a trading system such as MetaTrader. So our interface takes those rates and pushes them directly into MetaTrader with ultra-low latency. We have done a great deal of work so that traders can emulate institutional trading on Metatrader.”
Such collaboration will increase the market share of the hugely popular Metatrader platform in the UK. Traders are demanding low latency solutions, multiple order types and any tax advantage they can get. This is a good move by Smart Live markets to set themselves apart from the competition.
