TickCOM is a privately owned Danish company which was founded in 2005, with its focus on the development and provision of technologies for the visual development of indicators, trading strategies and systems for automated trading.
Keeping pace with technological change in this sector requires constant development, and many technology-led companies and software houses in the FX industry have had to concentrate their efforts on new product lines, innovation and reduction of development time, in order to bring new technologies to market and compete with others in the industry.
TickCOM have announced the imminent release of two new products. Firstly, VisualStation , which facilitates visual development of trading strategies and cross-market technical analysis ( CMTA ) using STRAT indicators.
The second product, iSTRAT, builds a portfolio of strategies which can be traded on TickCOM's centralized server. All strategies are backtested using up to the minute data. Each backtest session tests over 60.000 different strategies and then presents the top 100 to the user.
Forex Magnates spoke to Soren Lanng, TickCOM's CEO for an overview of the new releases.
Please give us a short introduction to your technology
Since 2005, we have conducted research which has been aimed at removing the entry barrier to strategy development and automated trading. The vision has been that traders should utilize personal strategies rather than everyone else's trading methods. We also believe that strategies and indicators should be developed visually and by the trader. Our development and Trading Platform VisualStation completely removes the entrance barrier to both indicator and strategy development, but has so far only been available in the professional segment.
How do you see the market for automated trading?
Market behaviour changes at an increasingly high speed, which I think is mainly due to the effects of the increasing use of computerized trading tools. We are getting close to a moment, if we are not already there, where market behaviour changes faster than strategies can be developed the traditional way.
We see that even professional discretionary traders have more difficulty each year in trading the markets. Charts become more complicated and the need for more information to be analysed is increasing. There are indicators within the market that there is becoming an increasing demand for what we call ”computer assisted trading”.
The entrance barrier to automated trading and strategy development is still very high and is increasing. A professional team typically considers the development cycle of one strategy to be around 3 months, whereas for a retail developer, this can be as long as one year. As a result of this, conditions in this sector are unfair to retail traders who require the use of these products. We can change this.
Which kind of products to you plan to introduce to the retail market?
There will be two products, both aimed at computer assisted trading. The first is a modified version of our institutional platform VisualStation (VS6), whereby traders can test their trading ideas within a time frame of a few minutes.
VisualStation is a platform for both discretionary trading and for strategy development, fully supporting Class II Technical Analysis. The trader can develop his own personal technical indicators using a proprietary one-click instant edit and test technology.
Trading ideas can in be turned into automated trading strategies in just a few minutes using one-click functionality with instant backtesting. The intention is to remove the emphasis from strategy development skills and time, instead allowing traders to focus on having a trading idea. This helps to set all traders equal. The development of indicators and strategies is done on a one-click basis across timeframes, instruments and data types.
The second product, iSTRAT, is a new type of proprietary trading application which is web based. We think this is the ultimate step in computer assisted trading, and also completes our inaugural research within the area of computer assisted trading.
Can you specify how iSTRAT represents the ultimate step in computer assisted trading?
iSTRAT is for traders who wish to spend just a few minutes each day and prefer to use automated trading instead of trading manually. iSTRAT assists the trader in developing portfolios of unique personal trading strategies for automated trading.
The product utilizes the technologies from VisualStation combined with new technologies such as neural networks and data mining. The product does not require the user to have skills within technical analysis or strategy development.
The iSTRAT product type will target a new market segment, and I think will introduce new types of traders to the FX market as well as bring more volume and Liquidity to the FX market.
