Plus500 Unveils +Insights. Exclusive Review and Q&A

Plus500, a global multi-asset fintech group operating proprietary technology-based trading platforms, unveils its new +Insights feature on Monday, giving traders access to data that could revolutionize their existing trading experience. Finance Magnates had an exclusive opportunity to test the service before its official launch and hold a question-and-answer (Q&A) session with the company product team.

+Insights is the newest add-on to Plus500's web platform and mobile apps available on iOS and Android stores, which aims to meet the different needs of the broker's customers. It features tools that combine millions of data points in real-time, presenting the most popular instruments, the highest-yielding trades and traders' overall sentiment.

As Plus500 reveals, this kind of data was previously out of customers' reach. The information on which assets are currently traded the most can allow for building profitable trading strategies. The addition of the +Insights tool is another step in developing and enhancing the product offering, and it is exclusive to Plus500 customers only.

By seeing how other users make their trades, customers will be able to benefit from the "wisdom of the masses" or, on the contrary, go against the tides of the retail trading market.

Plus500 +Insights Review. What the New Product Has to Offer?

After logging into the Plus500 platform, the user selects the +Insights icon from the main menu and moves to an intuitive and easy-to-use platform showing how the trading activity of the broker's clients is changing.

In the foreground, we see the Most Traded, Most Viewed, and Most Followed categories of instruments. In addition, we can observe which instruments make the most profits (or losses) and are most often bought (or sold).

Going to the 'Most Traded' tab, for example, shows the most frequently traded instruments at any given moment. The data (in this case) is based on more than one million open positions. In addition to the list of the most popular assets, the user can also see the distribution between short and long positions, the percentage change in the instrument's value, and the available maximum leverage. From that point, the trader can immediately make a transaction by clicking on the Buy or Sell button or can check the selected instrument's details.

The trader has access to filters to help select preferred time intervals (from one hour to one year), locations (global or local), and instrument types. By selecting a location, the user will see how traders from a given country behave or what trading decisions the entire Plus500 client base makes. The list can show all asset classes or be limited to specific ones, including Forex, commodities, indices, shares, and cryptocurrencies.

Similar experiences of the +Insightes are available from the mobile app for Android and iOS devices. The mobile version of +Insights offers the same features and capabilities as the web version, allowing traders to check statistics and data on millions of transactions at any time and any place.

Finance Magnates +Insights Q&A. Plus500 Answers Most Important Questions

+Insights is Plus500's new big-data analytics tool, available as a complementary service for customers across all operating systems. According to the Plus500 team, the launch of +Insights is the latest innovation in the brokerage's long track record of product development and technological advancement.

In an exclusive conversation with Finance Magnates, Plus500 answered questions about the latest offering, its growth plans, and the US.

+Insights is a bold new tool and a big step for Plus500 – for those uninitiated with it, how would you describe it? A "Social trading" or "Copytrading"?

In a number of ways, +Insights is the opposite of "Copytrading," which is focused on monitoring the activities of a single trader only. Plus500's +Insights, on the other hand, relies on the principle of the "wisdom of the masses" and empowers customers by providing them with unprecedented access and visibility to millions of data points on an aggregated level, derived from Plus500's entire customer base in real-time.

This "big picture" view from +Insights is completely unique in the industry and provides customers with the most up-to-date and relevant information that, up until today, was only available to brokers and professional traders.

And, what was the reasoning behind its launch? Has onboarding a new generation of traders during the Covid-19 pandemic changed trader expectations and demands?

Over the years, Plus500 has been a significant technology disruptor in the industry – from introducing the first-ever intuitive trading application to pioneering trading utilization on mobile devices.

+Insights is, therefore, the Group's most recent innovation and aims to ensure that Plus500 can further disrupt the market by revolutionizing trading, through empowering customers with additional knowledge, information and insights, to support them in their day-to-day trading activities.

+Insights was developed on the basis of customer feedback and demonstrates Plus500's on-going focus on customer care and delivering on customer requirements, to ensure that a best-in-class experience is maintained for customers.

Packed full of features, what can the average retail trader get at +Insights that they cannot get elsewhere?

With +Insights, customers can find information by searching, for example, "What is the most followed forex last week?", "What were the 10 most shorted stocks last month?" or "What were the instruments with the highest profit-making/loss-making trade ratios in last 24 hours?"

Customers will be able to customize their searches across categories and timeframes and, furthermore, they can tailor their searches around market insights on a local or global basis.

And, speaking of elsewhere, many will see this as a direct bid to challenge the dominance of eToro in this particular field. Is it?

Plus500's view is that the Group is creating an entirely new field with +Insights by allowing customers to harness the "wisdom of the masses" through leveraging Plus500's big data, which reflects a broader market sentiment.

This is entirely unique – no other platform has this capability. Consequently, Plus500 believes that +Insights will be a major competitive differentiator going forward.

Moving back to +Insights, are there plans to introduce additional features, if so what and when?

More features will indeed be introduced, as +Insights develops and grows. Plus500 is already at an advanced stage of building additional data-driven indicators which will enrich every instrument on the Group's platform and give a broader context to each instruments' performance – both within Plus500's own eco-system, as well as across the broader macro-environment.

And lastly, it feels like exciting things are happening at Plus500. The recent release of an ambitious 5-year plan had "expanding existing products, the introduction of new products," as central to growth. What can we expect next from Plus500 next and in the future?

Over the last two and a half years, Plus500 has developed a position as a global multi-asset fintech group, with a number of substantial and exciting growth opportunities available to the Group.

Plus500's strategy for growth is based on entering new markets, launching new products, expanding its OTC offering in new and existing markets, and deepening engagement with customers.

In the coming years, Plus500 is placing particular focus on accessing a number of significant growth opportunities in the US futures market. Specifically, there is a retail opportunity, where the Group aims to establish a new technology-based presence, and an institutional opportunity, where Plus500 will support institutional clients with brokerage-execution and clearing services.

Summary

The +Insights tool is undeniably a very interesting addition to traditional trading tools that examine the investors' sentiment on selected assets.

Despite Plus500 saying it has nothing to do with social and copy trading, it positions the company in a very profitable market. The size of the social trading industry was at $2.2 billion at the end of 2021 and is expected to grow by 7.8% annually to $3.77 billion by 2028. The new tool from Plus500, and others that should come in the future, will undoubtedly increase competition in a place, where eToro and NAGA are currently dominating.

Will it actually prove to be a significant competitive advantage for Plus500? The first impressions are undeniably positive, but it is time and the traders' opinion that will ultimately determine its boom or bust.