The digital representation of all aspects of trading has become an accepted norm these days, with services which assist trading decisions being a case in point.
Today’s introduction of , a news and commentary feed conducted by two senior industry analysts further emphasizes the FX industry’s penchant for real time market information.
The service intends to distill vast amounts of market data into easy-to-follow commentary in real time, and is aimed at providing useful and interesting information to retail and institutional FX traders alike.
The new service is owned and operated by FXStreet, and is intended to differentiate itself from a newswire, according to the company. FXBeat’s producers are not objectively describing the market but giving their own perspective into what is important and what is not. In doing so, they will often make fun of the markets illustrating a point with an interesting graphic or a YouTube video.
Analytical Pedigree
FXBeat is to be operated by Jamie Coleman and Gerry Davies, whose previous endeavours included the founding and senior management of FX information portal FXBriefs, and having held posts as Founder and Executive Editor and European Managing Editor respectively at Forex Live for four years.
As far as industry background is concerned, Mr. Coleman served in a series of spot FX trading roles within financial institutions such as ABN AMRO, and ING Investment Banking, before becoming Chief Dealer at Barings in the mid-1990s, and then serving a two year tenure at Fleet Bank as Vice President.
Ten years at Thomson Reuters followed, managing the Reuters FX Hub business, producing content for FX traders, with a brief spell as Managing Analyst on IFR Markets Forex Watch, Thomson Reuters’ institutional FX analysis product.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Mr. Davies spent a similar length of time at Thomson Global Markets, as Regional Director of the FX division based in the UK. Today, he made a corporate statement regarding the launch of FXBeat: “I’ve always regarded FXstreet.com as the premier foreign exchange information portal, and I’m very excited to now be part of the family.”
Mr Davies concluded that he is “looking forward to a long and fruitful association.”
Mr. Coleman further stated: “we’re delighted to be joining forces with FXStreet to expose our insightful forex analysis to the widest possible audience. The combination of our analytical strengths along with FXstreet.com’s powerful trading tools will be a must-have for active traders.”
The Information Generation
This year, a number of news analytics systems have come into being, using different methods of conveying information to end users and firms. At the beginning of the year, Harry Daniels, CEO of spoke to Forex Magnates on what he considers to be an important medium for conveying information to traders: social media.
Mr. Daniels explained at the time that “over the last 3 years, the financial industry has seen quite a leap in the amount of available content. We started noticing the effect of the power of Twitter at the start of the Greek crisis.”
Subsequently, Mr. Daniels explained that “StockTwits is an example of how derivative sites have started to focus on particular industries. Furthermore, the issue for institutions to concentrate on is that strict security (firewalls) hampers their ability to access this information; again this is where we come in. As a news aggregator, it’s our job to scan the wires and news blogs for information”.
“A further aspect to bear in mind regarding technology is that traders at private houses or at the banks are getting buffeted by the algorithms and we give them an edge they can use to get in front of the machines”.
Whilst LiveSquawk operates among the institutional FX heartlands of Singapore and London, opinions vary on the popularity of such media within the retail sector. Hugh Taggart, Head of Business Development at RavenPack, last week published material detailing this subject on the forum.
“Retail FX brokers and information portals have yet to pick up on the value of news or sentiment analysis based on text as a driver of trading activity and another hook to websites and trading interfaces. This is astonishing given this group of firms is renowned for its innovation and there is no shortage of noise in the big data space” explained Mr. Taggart.
Big Knowledge, Big Data
Mr. Taggart concurred that “yes, there are many brokers and platform vendors who think having sentiment data available to its clients would be ‘cool’ – either as a visual tool, an infographic or as a data source for an automated trading platform or strategy. But I have yet to see any of the mainstream players actually do anything about it. Perhaps I’m wrong and if so, please point me in their direction.”
Intends To Inject Character
Into Market News
FXBeat therefore represents a further step in the direction of adding a degree of personality and charisma to the provision of market information. Commenting on the issue, Carolina May, CEO of FXstreet.com, underlined the opportunity this agreement represents for its intended community of traders: “Jamie Coleman, Gerry Davis and their team have the great ability to produce down-to-earth, straight to the point analysis of the market movers. This will be a great addition to all the resources we are constantly trying to offer to the industry, from retail to institutional traders.”
“We are really happy to have them on board and hope this will reinforce our growth,” concluded Ms. May.
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