Some weeks everything seems to go your way. It’s true in Forex trading, and it’s true in building the first Forex trading social network. This week at Currensee towers, we’ve been ringing the bell big-time. On Tuesday, we announced our $8M B round of venture financing and the news got picked up all over the media, on Wednesday, our CEO Dave Lemont was on Bloomberg TV, on Thursday we had the biggest daily influx of members in our history, and today we held a webinar with Fox and CNBC guest analyst Bob Iaccino.
Check out our clip from Bloomberg TV’s InsideTrack show with Sara Eisen.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
Six months later – and six months is a long time in startup years – we’re back at it again, this time at the International Traders Expo in New York’s Times Square (the most Vegasy part of New York) We left the spokesmodels at home and spent the raffle money on rum & diet coke chocolate babka, but we got a lot more attention. People came to our booth already knowing about us or at least having heard about us.
I’m sure I’m missing somebody but here are shout-outs to some new and old friends we met up with: Jamie Coleman of FXLive, Maud Gilson from FXStreet, author Curtis Faith, David Kaplan from FXCM, Marilyn McDonald from IBFX, Betsy Waters from DBFX, Currensee member Brian Johnson from FXIntel, Elissa Fulop from Gain Capital, Ryan Sindelar from NinjaTrader, Currensee member Clair Wyant from IntegraFX, Todd Hanson from Live Trade Signals, Markus Heitkoetter from Rockwell Trading, and our new bestest drinking buddy, Matt Vann from MediaCougar. Don’t worry Matt, those pictures are totally not on our company intranet.
We gave away hundreds of Trade Leader superheros and talked up the Trade Leader program with novices and experts alike.
What seemed like a slightly wacky idea in Vegas – a social network for Forex traders? Traders willingly sharing information?? - was natural and normal in New York. And New York is a much more skeptical town. In fact, people with background in other asset classes seemed to be flocking to the Forex scene. As much as we’d like to, Currensee probably can’t take much credit for an uptick in interest in Forex, but we welcome it and we think we can help make Forex more welcoming to newcomers and more interesting for old-timers.
So where will Currensee be in another six months? I haven’t checked the tradeshow schedule, but I bet we’ll be in a lot more different places than we are today. There’s some good news I can’t talk about yet coming out next week, and lots of growing excitement about both the Forex trading social network and the Trade Leader program, too. Happy trading, everybody!
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
I have to say that I wish I was trading foreign exchange a bit more than I am at the moment. Actually make that a ton more than I am at the moment. These markets are moving and whether you or trading the AUD, CAD or the Yen we’re seeing enough significant moves to get traders excited and hopefully enjoying profitable trades.
One of the beauties of trading forex instead of say equities is that you shouldn’t be concerned on the direction of the moves either. If you are Long USDCAD this may not be hedging or offsetting other trades. In trading equities you may short the SPX but you are likely to be Long equities elsewhere in your portfolio. Liquidity, tight spreads and 24 hour market access are other good reasons to be involved in forex trading.
On Currensee you can see the positions of both the Community and your team members. My team members have over 100 positions on as I write. That is a nice tidy sum and many of those are with a bit of leverage of well. I’ll have a trade on as well the next time I receive a signal from my intra-day model but last week we missed some opportunities when my Expert Advisor failed to generate signals.
As we all know using Expert Advisors has become common place for individuals trading currency. If you can build a strategy and have your code written properly then you have a mighty convenient tool. It seems that we are all lacking time now-a-days and these EA’s seemingly allow you to do two things at once. Unfortunately for yours truly having that code written properly has become a stumbling block. We’re now reaching out to other experts and will hopefully have this rectified in the not too distant future.
Back to the trading environment, one look at the economic calendar, listed on the Research Dashboard on Currensee, shows a far less crowded calendar of events this week. A CGPI (PPI) figure out of Japan, US retail sales and GDP figures out of the Eurozone don’t exactly measure up to the direction that can be provided from NFP, ECB and G7 meetings. This should be viewed as a positive item for traders with winning strategies right now. There will be fewer speed-bumps to derail those trades that have been put on.
This should keep the focus on sovereign debt concerns, benign global interest rates and other hot items impacting markets right now. Following these items is easy enough using the Feeds widget on Currensee. This provides various top economic headlines from around the globe from multiple news organizations. Among the headlines that are Feeding as I write are stories on the Toyota recall, Chinese economic growth and Trichet’s visit to Sydney. More than a few items that traders may want to pay attention this week. Thus if you are looking for trader positioning, economic news releases or live news feeds the place to be is on Currensee.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
In response to demand of traders we’ve just implemented connectivity between Currensee and Twitter allowing traders to automatically Tweet their positions. The way the service works is that once you link your Twitter account you can chose which one of your brokers accounts you’d like to Tweet and we are automatically Tweeting on your behalf whenever you open or close a position. Since Currensee is the only platform that is connected in real time to more than 50 brokers the moment you execute the order we would Tweet on your behalf in real time. For those who are running business via Twitter we’ve also added the ability to Tweet only when positions are closed and thus attract customers.
One great service that can be along side with Currensee’s functionality is StockTwits and since we see the great value for our traders delivering the transparency we strive to into StockTwits we’ve implemented our Tweets using the same format that will be picked by StockTwits allowing traders for the first time to really Tweet what they do in their live accounts.
Currensee members who link their Twitter account are also going to be awarded 5 Currensee Bucks.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
The January issue of e-Forex magazine landed on our desks with a satisfying thud last week, and we’re just getting around to reading this article “Social networking helping to get retail FX traders together” in which Heather McLean interviews our own CEO Dave Lemont among others. In case you’re not a subscriber to e-Forex magazine, we’ve pulled a few choice quotes.
The article opens with a quote by Kellie Durazo of FX V-room, “I think there’s always been a desire within forex trading for a community, for a place where you can learn trading techniques, share information with fellow traders andlearn about what’s happening in the industry.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
There’s a lot of good discussion of both sponsored and independent communities, including this quote by Dave:
The forums, such as Forex Factory and FX Street, provide information and education, but it’s difficult for a trader to know who to trust. Currensee provides transparency; traders can see the real trades, performance and strategies of other traders, connect with traders with similar trade strategies and learn new ideas through collaboration. Traders want to understand what makes one trader more succesful than another. This learning can only be discovered through collaboration via real trades and performance data.
It goes without saying that the Currensee team believes strongly in the power of collaboration and transparency – that’s why we built Currensee and our ground-breaking Forex social indicators. We hope that more and more Forex traders take advantage of the plethora of social tools to reach out and engage with the community. The more we interact, the more we can learn to become better traders. Thanks to the team at e-Forex for devoting some ink to this topic.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
Today we announced Forex expert, author and mentor, Shaun Downey, is joining the Currensee trading social network team as our Chief Market Analyst. Shaun brings a wealth of Forex trading experience to us and our trader network and, in addition to being an active member on the Currensee platform including sharing his strategies, discussions and polls, he will be writing market commentaries, trend topics and blog posts to bring Currensee social analysis and data to the outside world.
If you haven’t read Shaun’s bio, it’s pretty impressive. He started trading at the age of 16, accomplished a litany of impressive positions with top-tier firms and shares my passion for boating, which I couldn’t appreciate more.
If you’re a member of Currensee, go ahead and send Shaun an invitation to be trading friends. Not a member of Currensee? What are you waiting for? Go ahead and join the Currensee trader network.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
TechCrunch reported today about an interesting new iPhone app they came across in the App Store. It’s an official app made by the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ), the American stock exchange. In the words of TechCrunch writer, MG Siegler, “That itself is interesting, but perhaps even more interesting is a key functionality of the app is to highlight tweets about various NASDAQ stocks.”
The app is called NASDAQ Portfolio Manager and, according to TechCrunch, it’s pretty slick. In addition to providing all the real-time quotes and data you’d expect, it also has some pretty cool charting features and, IMHO, the most interesting part of the whole app is that it has a special view that integrates all the latest tweets about that stock, coming in from StockTwits. If you don’t know about StockTwits and you’re a Forex trader, you need to check it out. The service is organized in “streams” and they recently launched a Forex stream, where you can see all the latest Forex tweets. A Forex tweet is denoted with $Currency pair (i.e. $USDJPY), and what’s even cooler is that you can sort the Forex stream by pair. Say you’re only interested in tweets about USD/JPY, click on the pair and just see that stream. We use StockTwits with our @Currensee Twitter stream to connect with influential Forex traders from around the world. Many new Currensee members find us on Twitter and connect with other Twitter members on Currensee.
This new NASDAQ app shows the innovation that comes when you blend social data with traditional data. The ability to look at a chart and a price and blend that with what other people are doing right now provides unique new insights and gives traders new decision-making tools. It’s reinforcing to see an institution like NASDAQ push the limits on data. I’m happy to be in such good company. :)
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
If you have been paying attention to the latest trends that have people talking, you will definitely have heard the words “Social Media”, “Twitter”, “LinkedIn”, and “Facebook” mentioned in one context or another. Unlike many trends which have come and gone, experts believe that not only is social media here to stay, it will soon reshape the future of online and offline communication.
Many international corporations are turning to social media for their customer support, as well as marketing campaigns. The fact of the matter is that traditional marketing tools such as billboards or newspaper advertisements simply do not reach as broad or as targeted of an audience as Twitter does. Using social media, you can distribute an article, a promotion, or any other type of message to an unprecedented number of relevant people, and track precisely how many of them saw it, and what was the result it triggered.
While the hype surrounding these new tools is continuing to grow, so is the number of people who find them overwhelming and are completely lost when it comes to using them. If we are taking Twitter as a case study, the amount of people that create an account, send out one tweet, then never access it again, is disproportionally high.
Even worse than people who do not understand how to use social media, are the spammers who abuse it. Twitter is filled with false accounts that are simply individuals trying to promote and sell their product by sending out the same message continuously. These spammers do not partake in any sort of dialogue, and some of them are actually not even run by humans, but rather by what is knows as bots, that simply send out messages automatically at a certain interval. Clearly, this is not what it is about.
Any Twitter user knows that one of the most common types of spammers, are Forex Twitter accounts. In fact, a quick Twitter search for the word Forex will paint a very clear picture of what kind of Twitter accounts exist that are tweeting about Forex-related topics.
Anyone with a little common sense can put one and one together and realize that the potential for cooperation between traders in the biggest global financial market and the most powerful social tool we have ever known is much greater than this. The problem is most people do not have a clue how to make this synergy work properly.
Moving over to the professional social network, LinkedIn, a different and more subtle problem exists. LinkedIn is not flooded with Forex spammers, in fact, LinkedIn is not flooded with Forex anything. There is close to no Forex presence on LinkedIn. If you search for Forex groups for example, you will find that although Forex has close to 3 trillion dollars traded daily, there are no more than 20 groups for Forex traders on LinkedIn. Very few online Forex brokers take advantage of LinkedIn and the powerful platform that it offers professionals. The same applies to Facebook, the potential is there, but it is not being fulfilled by Forex traders, brokers, or businesses.
Now that we have concluded that the major Forex players are not using social media to its full potential, how can that be fixed? The following is a list of some of the first steps every Forex company should take in order to start realizing the potential social media offers.
Full Transparency on Twitter: Create a real account with the name of your company, state who you are and what you represent as part of your Twitter bio, and post a real picture that can be your company logo, but NOT a picture of a fake person in order to attract more followers.
Genuine and Relevant Tweets: Do not tweet about getting rich fast, or how much money you have made from Forex. The people following you should already be interested in Forex. Share interesting content whether it be news, market analysis, tips, or interesting trading statistics. Do not tweet the same thing more than a maximum of three times throughout the day. It is true that there are different time zones and people are not going to see all of your tweets, but those that will, will not be happy seeing the same thing tweeted ten times.
An updated and informative LinkedIn Profile/Group: It does not matter how you go about it, whether you have a representative of the company create a profile or have a company group, you will need to have a LinkedIn presence of some sort. LinkedIn is where all the professionals hang out, and if you consider yourself a professional Forex entity, you need to be there too.
Facebook Page/Group: There is an ongoing debate which is more effective on Facebook, a page or a group. One thing is for sure, not having either one, will get you nowhere. Raise the awareness of your company on Facebook. Create special promotions for your page’s fans or the members of your group. Encourage people to join and communicate with other traders with their level of experience. Make your Facebook group or page into a useful resource for traders around the globe.
Stay on Top of New Developments: The social media space is continuing to grow and evolve with new social networks starting all the time. If you intend on participating and being an active part of the online community, you need to keep your fingers on the pulse of the Web 2.0 world at all times. New projects like Curensee might be the perfect community to learn from traders like yourself how to improve your trading skills. With all the lack of transparency caused by the anonymity of the Web, a platform that gives your real time access to the actual trades of your friends might be exactly what you need.
In conclusion, social media is the most game-changing communication tool the world has known since the invention of the telephone. It is now pretty much a given to all online experts that it is in fact here to stay and leave an unprecedented mark on the world of global communication. Forex, which is by far, the largest financial market on the globe, as well as a safe option for many people in today’s troubling financial times, should be maximizing the potential of social media instead of wasting everyone’s time and money spamming users and hoping someone will take the bait. Forex companies should start by implementing the above steps, which will not only bring them positive results, it will improve the reputation of the Forex industry as a whole.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
Ring the bell…The Currensee trader network is open for all Forex traders to join!
Today, we announced that our Currensee trader network – the first-ever Forex trading social network – is open to the public. For those of you who have been following our journey, you know that we spent eight months in our invitation-only private beta stage. Here in startup land, eight months seems to fly by more like eight weeks, especially when you are building the types of technology and collaboration features that take mere mortals years to build.
As I thought back to where we started, it seems like forever-ago that we invited 25 brave beta testers to try out our new idea for a trader social network. Our founders, Asaf and Avi, had a strong vision – they wanted to build a place where Forex traders could collaborate based on real trades and real data – but it’s hard to cook up a social network with only 25 people. So we started inviting more, a few hand-picked Forex traders at a time. And we started adding features and tuning our performance and analytics. We were lucky to have loyal and vocal members who spoke up when things weren’t working they way they expected or when they had a feature idea or suggestion they wanted to share. The product became more and more robust and more and more traders starting requesting invitations.
The Currensee team kept cranking out new features, programs, promotions, controversial videos and other Forex trader goodies. And, in just eight months, things are very different than they were on that chilly day back in February. We have almost a thousand people trading together. We have an innovative product that combines the fun of a social network with the unique insights of strategies, performance and sentiment data…all based on the trader network. We started with members from two countries and supporting two brokers. In just eight short months, we have members from over 64 countries and support close to 40 brokers.
On behalf of the Currensee team, I want to thank all of our private beta members that joined before there was even a real product. We could not have come this far so quickly without your help and dedication to making Currensee a special place for Forex traders.
Today we leave the invitation-only private beta behind us and throw the doors open to the world. We invite you to join our unique trader network and see for yourself what makes Currensee the place to trade together.
When my friends ask me about what makes Currensee so great, I always talk about the open collaboration we bring to the world of Forex. That we’re changing the game by giving all types of Forex traders the ability to connect with one another, see live trades and positions and share strategies, ideas, victories and their losses. We call it transparency and Trading Together is how we make it happen.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
All that glitters is not gold. Although gold has been pretty glittery against the dollar lately, there’s been some interesting discussion on Currensee about the Australian Dollar, too. It started with Craig noting that the AUD looks strong against the US Dollar and asking for comments.
Barak jumped in with some good technical notes on the overnight interest rate and observed that “0.9000 is a psychological level as well as a technical resistance level” which made me check the Community Historical Volatility widget…
…that shows us some entry and support points on the AUD/USD pair based on the Currensee community’s actions, which we can also see in the Market Watch:
Which shows that the community is split 50/50 long and short on the AUD/USD pair, but there’s more volume long and at least for the moment, the short money is winning.
Log in to Currensee to add your thoughts to the discussion and check the social indicators.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
Currensee is the first social network for forex traders. We bring Forex traders from around the world together to make trading decisions in real time using live trading data.
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