Exclusive launch: Today’s retail traders want everything on one single platform

A very recent dynamic within the technological topography that provides a live market trading environment to multi-asset retail traders is the requirement, often driven by the demands of retail traders themselves, for every component to be fully integrated on one single trading platform.

The days of external ancillary systems are passe, and companies that have not kept pace with technological change in this respect are now finding that their market share is dwindling.

Today, another development which exemplifies the level of sophistication that is now required by retail traders has materialized, this time in the form of Autochartist’s integration of actionable content into the proprietary, opensource SaxoTraderGo platform.

In order to take a close look at the ethos behind this development, FinanceFeeds spoke in detail to Kim Cramer Larsson, Product Manager & Technical Analyst at Saxo Bank, and Ilan Azbel, CEO of Autochartist in order to investigate the rationale behind the integration, and the functionality that the presence of market content displayed natively within a trading platform can provide to enable traders further.

The integration of Autochartist’s system into Saxo Bank’s trading environment is timely, bearing in mind that retail traders now demand all of their tools and ancillary services on the same platform from which the execute trades. It would be interesting to elaborate on the factors which led Saxo Bank to taking that direction and making such content available natively.

Beginning on this subject, Mr. Cramer Larsson explained to FinanceFeeds “For a long time we have been discussing internally what kind of tools could we develop or offer to our clients to bring value. What could help them to improve their decision making and trading. It should be easy to use, easy to understand and in general intuitive.”

“We have looked at several third party tools and decided if we should add some 3rd party software into our platform we should do properly ie. a full integration. No stand alone or opening up a new browser window or something like that. We wanted it to fit in with our own design and the way our platform works and use our in-house developed chart to show the pattern signals on” – Kim Cramer Larsson, Product Manager & Technical Analyst, Saxo Bank

“Our strategy is to offer our clients identical user experience across all devices desktop, tablet and mobile. By truly integrate Autochartist Trade Signals in to our platform across all devices we can offer our clients exactly that. Clients can find trade signals on the platform on his mobile as well on his PC” said  Mr. Cramer Larsson.

According to FinanceFeeds research, many listed derivatives venues are now angling their services toward retail traders, and in doing so, providing content and market analysis in a very retail focused way, as shown by CBOE LIVEVOL’s launch last year of a new site which uses the Amazon model in which traders can go to a ‘cart’ and buy their market data and then view it on their platforms.

On this basis, FinanceFeeds asked Mr.  Cramer Larsson if Saxo Bank views the integration of actionable content as a means of attracting and maintaining a professional level trader that may have larger volumes and lifetime value – as a listed derivatives trader would.

We asked “With the OpenAPI based SaxoTraderGo platform, can institutions and white label partners of Saxo Bank that have developed their own interface in order to integrate the Saxo Bank trading environment into their own system, also stream the Autochartist actionable content to their customers via their own platforms?”

“Our White Label Partners can get the Autochartist feature in March. They have use our platform. Brokers not using our platform cannot get our version of the Autochartist Trade Signals” said Mr. Cramer Larsson.

Nowadays, ergonomics are such a priority for retail traders, especially with regard to the ability to gain all of their data and market information as well as trade execution facilities from one device.

Trading on the go is vital for many, thus with the availability of every function on one system, the end of the multi-screen trading environment for retail traders could be nigh as the mobile-first era is now here, hence traders being able to access actionable content via all devices, on just one platform.

On this subject, Mr. Cramer Larsson said “I don’t think the multi-screen desktop environment will be the end but more and more of our trades are coming from mobile phones. That’s why we offer same features across all devices including this new Trade Signals tool.”

Saxo Bank is one of the major firms that genuinely has a multi-product trading environment, including a combination of OTC and listed products, and liquidity via bank and non bank based prime of prime. FinanceFeeds took a look at how  the actionable content can be provided across all asset classes and all execution types.

“Actionable contact certainly can be provided across all asset classes” said Mr. Cramer Larsson. “We plan to offer Autochartist Trade signals on not only FX, Single stock and Stock CFD’s but also on Stock Index futures and Commodity futures and the related CFDs.”

With regard to what Mr. Cramer Larsson envisages to be the next development in trading platforms and engagement tools for 2017, he said “For our part we plan to develop this feature further, and add more instruments, detailed search and filtering and alerts and push notification giving our clients the option of setting specific alerts on instruments, time intervals, type of patterns among other developments.”

“Clients can then receive a notification to his mobile that there is a new signal . The client can then log in to his mobile and place a trade or order. Our clients will never miss a signal even when being away from the computer” concluded Mr. Cramer Larsson.

Mr. Azbel, who founded and presides over Autochartist, the company that developed the integrated actionable content solution, explains its necessity in today’s retail FX component structure in four specific stages. “Firstly, despite the ever maturing market, most flow is still from retail traders who, lets be honest, don’t know what they are doing” Mr. Azbel explained to FinanceFeeds.

“These particular traders need to have somebody holding their hand. However, they don’t want “black-boxes”, they want transparency. They don’t want an unknown 3rd party telling them what they think; they want a trusted source using trusted methodologies. Transparency creates trust” – Ilan Azbel, CEO, Autochartist

Mr. Azbel then moved on to the second facet. “Secondly,” he said, “when we look at websites like investing.com, fxstreet, dailyfx, and other similar websites, a relatively small percentage of their readership is for written analysis. Nobody is interested in reading any more. People want simple-to-understand information.”

“Thirdly, the cost of customer acquisition is getting so high that no broker in his right mind wants to pass his clients to be pixeled on a 3rd party website and remarketed to later. The broker needs to try and keep his customer in his own universe. This is another reason why bigger brokers don’t want to use 3rd party “free” chart tools and rather build their own. Any redirection of customers to 3rd party platforms may result in loss of a customer” – Ilan Azbel, CEO, Autochartist

Mr. Azbel detailed the fourth aspect as being “During the lifetime of a trader, the only time they visit the brokers website is during sign-up and deposit. After that they never visit the broker’s website again. They only launch their trading application. If a tool is not in the trading app then its not going to be used.”

“However, effective use of content isn’t only limited to the trading component of a broker’s operations” he explained.

Concluding, Mr. Azbel stated “We are seeing a major push towards using content as a marketing tool. But again, not as a third party, but rather as deeply integrated into CRM packages and closely linked to customer messaging logic based on customer profiles.”

“However, this more sophisticated use-case of content requires more content to be available at any time because the broker needs to have relevant timely information at his disposal at any time of day; allowing him to pick and choose the content to send to specific traders. So whether we are talking about integration of content into trading apps, or integration of content into CRM packages, the key trend is “integration”.

Featured image: Saxo Bank, Hellerup, Denmark. Copyright FinanceFeeds