In January, Saxo Bank entered the social trading field as it relaunched its TradingFloor website from a news and and research site to its new social trading portal. Since launching the new product, Saxo Bank phased out the old TradingFloor site, with it getting totally shelved in April and hard launched to more languages including French, German, Spanish and Turkish. As reported in January, in its current iteration, TradingFloor is a blend of Saxo Bank’s research and trading network allowing customers to follow other traders as well as view news, ideas and real-time trades taking place on an asset specific level. In addition, customers can now trade directly from the TradingFloor social Trading Platform .
So far, the change and investment by Saxo Bank appears to be paying off as monthly unique TradingFloor visitors have grown by more than 150% since the end of January to over 336,000 in September. Commenting on the growth, Saxo Bank representatives expressed to Forex Magnates, “The site continues to play a central role in engaging our existing clients but our aim with TradingFloor.com remains to transform trading into a social experience by combining popular social features with Saxo Bank’s online trading platform. Today, users are able to share their trading strategies and activities, join in online discussions, follow and copy other traders, as well as trade various asset types directly from the site.”
TradingFloor Unique Visitors (T4 is a new social site)
Looking ahead, Saxo Bank expects growth to continue as it launches TradingFloor in additional languages. In addition, with Saxo Bank reportedly working on the creation of a new HTML5 version of their trading platform, we expect to see further integration of social features appearing on the new system. As such, this could boost overall uptake of Saxo Bank’s social offerings among its clients.
In addition, not yet available, but planned for Q1 of next year is full automated copy trading. Currently, customers are available to follow and manually copy trades of other traders. Yet to be enabled is full copy trading where customers can follow a trader and have their trades automatically copied into their account. Back in January, Saxo Bank mentioned the feature which was their main item that they wanted to add, but also needed to pass regulatory approval, as European regulators have been drawing new rules to govern copy trading and signals. Upon its launch, copy trading is expected to provide addtional uptake of the product and could be used by Saxo Bank to market TradingFloor to money managers.
Aiming to currently increase growth and part of their effort in raising awareness of the platform, Saxo Bank has also embarked on a series of trading contests being launched among its various regional offices.Overall for Saxo Bank, social trading is viewed as a long-term bet by the broker for the future, as it positions itself towards offering products to meet the interests of new customers, as well as providing monetization and content distribution opportunities for existing traders and partners.
