TradeStation, the award-winning equities, futures and forex brokerage, today announced the launch of its new forex trading platform, one that enables the design, back- testing and automation of forex trading strategies based on inside, inter-bank spreads of the kind made available to institutional and professional traders.
This "direct access" forex offering delivers to TradeStation clients the inside price transparency and automated and manual strategy trading capabilities they have come to expect from the firm's equities, equity option and electronic futures service offerings. Forex trades may now be executed directly from the TradeStation order bar or market depth window, or through the use of macros or full automation.
"We believe the TradeStation platform will be a dominant force in the forex industry," said Salomon Sredni, CEO of TradeStation Group, the parent company of TradeStation. "When we made this same change to our futures and options brokerage offerings, our account and trade activity in those areas grew rapidly. While of course no assurances can be given, we hope for similar results with our integrated forex trading platform."
"Forex is an international market," continued Sredni. "In other words, it is a 'local' market everywhere. It trades 24 hours a day. It is the most liquid market in the world and one that appears to be growing for individual traders in the U.S. and abroad."
Currently, it is estimated that daily forex trade volume for retail (as opposed to institutional) trader accounts is $25 to $50 billion, which represents only about 2% of the whole market, which is estimated to be approximately $1.9 trillion of daily volume for the traditional currency pairs.
The TradeStation approach to forex strategy trading is already well known in the institutional forex trading community, as it was offered to institutional traders world-wide from 1996 through 2006 as a premium service for the Telerate feed. The institutional traders who subscribed to Telerate for this TradeStation premium service generally used it to design, test and optimize their forex trading strategies.
Tighter, Inside Spreads Now Offered for a Reasonable Commission
Another major improvement to TradeStation's forex service offering, which is being made available to all new and existing forex accounts, is to give clients much tighter spreads on their forex deals in exchange for a reasonable commission. Under the old way of doing business, much like the old days of stock trading before direct market access, the dealer who trades with individual account holders takes or shares in a large spread between the dealer's cost and what the client pays or receives - typically at least $30, and as high as $50 or $60, for a 100,000 deal lot, even in a very liquid currency pair. No commission is charged - but that is why: The dealer is making a tidy profit taking or sharing in that large spread. Under TradeStation's new pricing plan, it will be offering tighter "inside" spreads - as small as $10 per 100,000 deal lot for the most liquid currency pairs - in exchange for a reasonable "round-turn" commission that will typically be $5.00 per 100,000 deal lot.
"We believe that the vast majority of active forex traders know this is a better, fairer pricing deal - and the ones who don't will soon learn that is the case," said Sredni. "We believe the combination of this new pricing with the power and quality of our new, seamless forex trading platform will be an offer that is hard to match."
Other New Features in TradeStation 8.3
In addition to the new forex offering, this new release of the TradeStation platform, TradeStation 8.3, contains improvements in other areas to support the active trader, including the addition of numerous fundamental data Indicators, PaintBar Studies and Strategy Components that support the design and testing of fundamental data strategies, and increased optimization of analysis technique calculations for Chart Analysis and RadarScreen.