Automated trading has been a part of institutional foreign exchange trading for decades now, and while experienced coders and quants have been building trading strategies for different markets at institutional level, the retail Forex market has always been keen to follow in their steps.
With the development of social and copy trading delivering automated trading strategies to the masses, one fundamental aspect of automated trading remained absent from the market. Traders willing to exercise more control over their portfolios were left with few options to diversify between different strategies.
TickCOM comes to the automated trading market delivering its iStrat solution which just might change this landscape and provide the end user a tighter grip over the automated trading strategy which is executed on his account.
New strategies can be developed within minutes using the most recent data available, thereby adapting them to perform in the current market conditions. The output which is generated from the strategy testing process are equity charts, similarly displayed to social and copy trading where the user selects among equity charts.
Clients may develop a portfolio each morning, set exit levels and wait and see if the stop loss or the gain exit level is hit first - a form of binary option trading, except the user has more influence on the outcome while using iSTRAT. All strategies and portfolios can be adjusted during the day.
Since the beginning of retail foreign exchange trading, automated trading has been consistently growing due to some platforms providing the opportunity for writing one’s own algorithms for trade execution. However, this functionality is ultimately limited to the majority of clients, as they do not possess coding skills.
TickCOM aims to revolutionize this status quo by delivering users the opportunity to easily design and deploy automated trading strategies to the market, which can be then used by the traders at the broker.
iStrat at a Glance
The user experience delivered by iStrat is similar to social and copy trading, but there is a big difference which can revolutionize automated trading strategy development for retail investors - the user develops his own custom strategies, versus the fixed strategies in social and copy trading.
The user can perform Risk Management by building balanced portfolio of strategies, using different currency pairs, or even several strategies from same currency pair. Using a portfolio of strategies lowers the risk of trading, similar to trading a portfolio of stocks, or institutional pair trading.
Providing this new kind of strategy development solves the problem of brokers having to manage and pay strategy providers or trade leaders. iSTRAT further provides the users with custom automated trading, giving the user influence on the outcome of automated trading.
The user may develop a portfolio each morning, setting exit levels, waiting to see if the stop loss or the gain exit level is hit first - a form of binary option trading, but the user has an influence on the outcome in iSTRAT, since strategies and portfolios can be adjusted during the day.
TickCOM's CEO, Soren Lanng explained, “There is no necessity for the user to have knowledge about technical indicators or in depth currency market experience, but to use conceptual thinking, since an equity chart is a visual representation."
"We are thereby continuing the path of bringing financial trading to the broader market, and in particular automated trading . iSTRAT is at the edge of the possible, pushing this edge forward within automated trading and strategy development,” he concluded.
Automation Beyond Social and Copy Trading
As the market introduced copy and social trading, they came along with a number of drawbacks - strategies not preforming consistently, traders not getting the same execution rates as trade leaders due to delays, slippage, etc. While social and copy trading companies have been concentrating their efforts on how to optimize their offerings, TickCOM has focused on delivering a customizable automated trading experience to the masses.
The company will be releasing its new automated trading front end, iSTRAT, which can be integrated with MT4 servers. Users will be able to create strategies on-the-fly and deploy them to the market within seconds after their creation and backtesting.
The company’s CEO Søren Lanng, commented to Forex Magnates' reporters, “With the increasing demand for automated trading, we see that the market is now requesting new strategies. Since typical strategy development takes months for an experienced team, there is a limited availability of new strategies on the market.”
“The market behaviour is in fact now changing faster than new strategies can be developed. There are thereby major problems to solve within automated trading, but also substantial opportunities for those who manage to solve these issues,” Mr. Lanng added.
“The optimal solution is the user can online, on-the-fly develop his own custom strategies, fit to work right now in the market, using institutional grade development. This is what we provide with iSTRAT, the result of 8 years of R&D, reorganizing the steps of the traditional institutional strategy development, cutting the development time from months to seconds,” he explained.
iSTRAT will be available as a native app, available on Android, iOS, Windows and MacOS.
