INSIDE VIEW : The 2021 trading landscape

TopFX CEO Alex Katsaros talks about the evolution of the trading landscape during the last 3 years and shares his views about the CFDs trading trends in 2021.

1. How have traders' needs changed over the last 3 years?

The last three years were quite eventful for our industry. Firstly, we have the European regulators imposing restrictions on the marketing and distribution of CFDs, as well as substantial leverage restrictions. Secondly, we have the pandemic lasting for a whole year, which has brought turmoil to the markets, increased volatility and locked people inside their homes. Lastly, we have two major bullish cryptocurrency market periods and one extremely bearish.

That being said I do not consider a trader's needs to be changing. CFD traders have simple demands. They want high leverage, great execution, safety of funds and good support. We definitely have periods of increased volumes, but we are always working on our core offering, aiming to satisfy these trading needs. During this three-year period, we introduced new entities and added more Liquidity Providers to our infrastructure for a further improvement of our institutional-grade pricing and execution. We have also scaled our support department to accommodate for our massive growth. Last, we offer negative balance protection across all entities and keep clients’ funds segregated in European institutions.

2.  How is the industry evolving and what tools will be more in demand in the future?

The CFD industry is a mature industry. I don't consider it to be evolving too much in terms of new products and tools, since it has always been a leader in offering high-quality technical analysis and trading robots for 15 years now.

A major change that took place in the last decade is the shift of the consumers towards mobile devices, so a lot of work is being done to integrate the existing tools of our industry in mobile applications. At TopFX, we offer the cTrader app which features advanced technical analysis, news, live sentiment, trading blotter, economic calendar, signals and copy trading.

No one can accurately predict the future. There’s a big increase in copy trading volume, so we are confident that this product will take off. That said, I believe that the trend of integrating CFD tools into whichever device consumers prefer is what the future holds.

3. Have you seen a difference in the methods traders prefer to use  (copy, signals, bots, manual) or the instruments they prefer?

Yes, we have seen a substantial increase in the volumes of copy trading. This was expected due to the revamp of the copy functionality in cTrader, which has introduced major improvements. For example, strategy providers can choose the type of fee they want to charge and set the minimum investment amount they require from the copier. In this way, they can enjoy more meaningful returns. Besides the flexibility in setting up fees, strategy providers can have private strategies that can be shared via invite link to selected people or opt to display their strategy publicly. It’s important to add that the accuracy of copying has increased with cTrader’s copying model which now uses equity to equity ratios. Clients find it very easy to evaluate the performance of strategy providers and choose the strategy that better suits their expectations, risk tolerance and goals.

Lastly, we have recently launched copy trading for Android devices and are working to incorporate it into iOS as well.

In regards to the most traded instruments, EURUSD, Gold and BTC are the clear winners in the year of the pandemic.

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