One of the advantages for brokers creating their own proprietary trading platforms is the ability to easily add new features to the system to meet current demand in the market. One of the more recent brokers to launch with their own Trading Platform is New Zealand MahiFX. What makes the company interesting is that it taking ‘the road less traveled’ on two fronts; by creating its own proprietary trading platform, and being proud of the advantages of being a market maker. On the latter, with much of the current market chatter in the retail space about the benefits of working with a ‘no dealing desk’ broker and conflicts of interest, MahiFX is going with the direction of ‘you can’t beat our spreads’.
In regards to its trading platform, while most of the broker’s previous announcements have been pretty ordinary, such as the release of trading from charts or trading alerts, the cumulative progression of the offering is becoming more impressive. In addition, MahiFX has recently launched a new social feature to platform which allows traders to share their trades on Facebook. The offering integrates with Facebook’s API and allows for adding charts and comments to the ‘share’. For that are part of social trading groups the share function alleviates the need to work with multiple platforms. On the marketing side of the product, the Facebook update clearly announces it is from MahiFX which if it becomes popular will be a low cost way for the broker to advertise itself. Because of marketing benefits, it is a little surprising that we haven’t seen more brokers promoting such a ‘share’ feature.
MahiFX gets social: ‘just one click’ technology and FX traders can now share trades through Facebook New platform release enables easy-option sharing of charts, insight and commentary with forex social trading communities LONDON, 20 December 2012 – MahiFX, the proprietary-built platform providing retail FX traders access to institutional level technology and pricing, has launched a new ‘just one click’ functionality that gives traders the ability to instantly share their trading inspiration and strategies with their social trading community and friends. The new platform feature lets clients export charting screenshots of their trades along with user-generated commentary and analysis instantly via Facebook. Part of MahiFX’s accelerated platform development programme, the new feature has been introduced in response to the growing interest in social trading amongst retail FX traders keen to share insight, knowledge and trading tips. Traders can now login to Facebook directly from within the MahiFX API and share screenshots of chosen trades in both the Book view and Analysis tab. And to promote knowledge share and discussion, traders have the facility to add comments to each individualised screenshot. “Retail FX trading is an increasingly open and collaborative endeavour”, says David Cooney, MahiFX CEO. “As the market democratises it’s unsurprising that traders will gravitate towards communities that share trading insight and practical trading advice. In addition to the educational tools that we provide on our site and blog, this new social trading feature will serve to foster knowledge share and provide our traders with an open, transparent and novel means to learn and discuss the markets, differing trading strategies and tactics in order to inform their own personal trading strategy.” MahiFX is headed by David Cooney, former global co-head of currency options and e-FX trading at Barclays Capital and responsible for the award winning e-commerce platform BARX and Susan Cooney, former head of e-FX Institutional Sales in Europe for Barclays Capital. As a market maker MahiFX is able to provide traders direct access to institutional level execution speeds and spreads through its proprietary-built fully automated pricing and Risk Management technology.
