2.2 million people in the UK make investments per year, and it isn’t all in the London stock exchange. Forex markets have enjoyed a rise in popularity in recent years and are some of the biggest and most active in terms of trade volumes available to investors. Globally, the options to access these markets are numerous and, until the last decade, largely closed off to newcomers hoping to easily make the fast, reactive trades common in the Forex market. However, Forex trading has become much more open in recent years, with a global increase of a staggering 300% in the last year alone.
Traders range from first-timers with no strategic plans to experienced traders looking to build a deliberate portfolio. Each trader has individual needs and is searching for different benefits. Some look for the widest range of Forex products to trade in, others might be looking for low fees, mobile access, educational materials, or simply the overall user experience of the platform itself. Regardless of why they start, the reality is that everyone is figuring out where the market looks to be going and how fellow traders are behaving. For a long time, even once mobilization had begun, they hadn’t been able to access those insights. Enter crowd trading, the new means of understanding the market.
Crowd Trading features, as part of a full service, are delivering real-time engagements and the ability to make more informed decisions. Online trading isn’t always easy to predict, and crowd trading seeks to temper potential inaccuracies by observing the long-term trading decisions of large groups.
The negative outcomes of poor trading psychology, such as emotional investing can be pervasive. So, the success of crowd trading depends, in part, on having the right outlook. Having a strong grasp over your own emotions, and making rational choices is a huge advantage. In fact, understanding your risk tolerance, and maintaining discipline will be one of the best ways to allow yourself to carry out an effective strategy, whether that’s long-term growth or short-term gains. Crowd trading provides the ability to stay true to that course, by viewing real-time information on trading crowds’ movements.
In equal measure, the capacity to make the rational choice tends to be far higher when the individual opts to decide for themselves. In simple terms, crowd trading features on platforms like the London-based company Trade360, are functional feeds tracking and reporting crowd behaviour. In this case, the platform visualises percentages of users also buying and selling a specific asset which aids understanding by presenting the information in an engaging yet simple way.
It’s the visibility of the market that we often aren’t easily able to access, especially from mobile applications. Depicting the behavioural context behind trends and being able to judge the market sentiment in real-time delivers the sort of high-quality insight a trader can benefit from over any time frame.
Due to the global nature of Forex, you’re also able to make decisions on a 24/7 basis. It’s worth remembering the availability of assets will rely on the time zone, which can be from London Greenwich or Australian Central, and the regional markets associated. Crowd trading feeds are not commonplace on every platform, which is somewhat surprising given the human insight they offer. They can be a genuine differentiator and unique enhancement to the user experience.
The likelihood is that increasing numbers of platforms will aim to tap into the social engagement of feeds like this. This is because these feeds can translate behaviour into something more useful to the trader, rather than serving only as a subject of speculation.
The future of trading thirty years ago largely revolved around the speed of service delivery and remote access. Today, we can access and trade anywhere, anytime, and instantaneously. The logical next step was to deepen the experience through new features like Crowd trading, increasing the user’s immersion in each decision they make.
Providing the context to allow even the first-timer the information to make decisions can be the difference between simply following the crowd and analysing trends coming and adapting accordingly.