A review of FXBees.com – a forex social network
FXBees.com is yet another social networking website aimed at forex traders. I checked it out recently and it seems to
FXBees.com is yet another social networking website aimed at forex traders.
I checked it out recently and it seems to be a stripped down version of Currensee.
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Personally, I’m not really a fan of social networking sites, even if it is related to trading, but the success of Currensee has definitely opened my eyes a little, even though I’m still not totally convinced.
Ok, so what’s there to like about FXBees.com? Well, firstly, they allow you to open a live account with a broker. At the moment they only have one broker, but this will increase over time undoubtedly.
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So, what this means is, the trading activities of all members will be published in real time, and are based on real trades. So you can easily identify real traders, this helps you to improve you trading, potentially. If there’s a trader you like, you can become their “friend”. And what’s more, you can sort traders by how good they’re performing. This feature therefore, is quite powerful, since it’ll be easy to make friends with the good traders.
And if there’s a particular currency pair you like, you can see which traders are doing well on which pairs. Which, in theory, is pretty cool. So in real time – you know who’s trading what. However, this can also be rather dangerous. What can happen is that new traders can fall into the trap of blindly following other traders and copying their trades, without knowing the reason or strategy behind it. This is definitely a major issue, and it is for this primary reason why I’m not too keen on forex social network sites. With forex forums however, at least there is a discussion and explanation about different forex methods, and reasoning behind trades. And even though FXBees does have a forum, in my opinion most new traders won’t even bother with this, because they’ll just wanna quickly enter the latest trade that Trader XYZ has taken.
Unfortunately there is also another disadvantage. Most of the trades and results are based on demo accounts. Everyone knows not to trust demo account results. Ok, they may give an indication. But I have seen literally hundreds of cases where people simply can’t replicate their demo results in a live account. And if you’re trading the lower timeframes, especially when scalping, it becomes almost impossible, unless you’re very skilled. So now, a new trader looks at Trader XYZ and thinks, wow, this guy is making 1000pips a month! And then starts copying his trades without thinking. This is real bad news. Way too risky. A bad way to trade. A step in the wrong direction. The new trader will most likely wipe his account and then blame XYZ. Everyone has a responsibility. Forex sites, experienced traders, and new traders.
Overall I would say FXBees has promise, but it needs to eliminate demo accounts, and it needs to stress the dangers of blindly following other traders. Sites such as Currensee also have a duty to stress this danger – and not pretend to everyone that what they’re offering is the best way to trade. It’s not.
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Michael, Thanks for the post and the mention of us (Currensee). There are a few points I want to clear that IMO are a key distinction between a community and a social network. 1) Privacy – You choose who you are sharing the data with – As oppose to communities like this where your information is public domain, Currensee, and other social networks, don’t publish everything to the entire world and in fact we are very protective of our traders and make sure they control who they share their real trade with and how much information is shared. This seems… Read more »
Currensee has got to be the most self-righteous crew in Forex. Must be some sort of special milk they’re sucking from their VCs teat. Hmm…
Hi Michael, thanks again for the write-up and I do agree with most points you made. I just would like to give comments about two points: 1) Privacy – we take privacy very serious at FxBees.com and for us this is no minor fact. Thats why our members are not required to provide any login information for their accounts. I think this is much more important than the question, if your trades are just shared to a few or all members. 2) Demo Accounts – I cant comprehend why demo accounts should reduce transparency, if demo trades are labelled as… Read more »
Andre, The big caveat with demo account is that they don’t resemble anything that happens in reality, not from the trader perspective and definitely not from a broker perspective and this is why they are misleading. From the trader perspective trading is 90% psychology and money management both of them a trader does not experience on a demo account – you should read what John Forman (http://www.theessentialsoftrading.com/Blog/index.php/2009/03/13/live-trading-performance-not-matching-demo-trading-success/) and other famous blogger wrote about trading in a Demo. From the broker perspective the demo accounts get executed at the same price you see on the charts where everyone who traded in… Read more »
Hi Andre, great post and rejoinder. Really like your site and your vision! Here’s wishing you luck in building your userbase, I hope you join myfxbook.com in putting Currensee out of business. My prediction: Currensee will have a big layoff by the end of the year. Why? Well they’re over staffed, they aren’t making money, they have to pay their members to use a free site, their investors are getting pissed at the lack of growth, they’re employing desperate gimmicks like “bucksapalooza”, myfxbook is kicking their butt without daddy VC’s money, and Asaf is so frustrated that he’s fighting his… Read more »
Ouch … Now this was personal. In Hebrew there is a saying that Prediction was given to the fools so I wouldn’t try to make predictions if I were you. I have no idea what is going to be by the end of the year but I can reassure you that our investors are very happy with the progress and that my team is also extremely happy with the progress and the ability to help real traders become more effective – you can ask them as they are all on Currensee (Investors and team) BTW – thanks for reading my… Read more »
Asaf, I don’t even know what the tweets looked like, but I know that they somehow promoted/linked to the Currensee website. Why else would Stocktwits ban you? It’s obviously not for the reason you stated in your blog. Do you realize that people can still see you when you have your hand over your eyes? BTW, Michael, it’s not cool to edit my comment. I understand if you want to block my comment, but please don’t edit, that’s not fair good buddy! For the record my last post originally said the following: “I hope you join myfxbook.com in putting Currensee… Read more »
Well, You seem to know a lot about Currensee yet you chose to hide behind an anonymous name instead of having a discussion like a mature person. Just for your knowledge – we have approached StockTwits and offered to change the format of the tweet however they like to make sure there is no advertisement in it (and there isn’t any right now) and their reply was that they are not interested in tweets coming from an automated verified platform and it has nothing to do with the format – they offered us to have our traders retweet the same… Read more »
Michael, the word I posted is regularly used by my 4 year old son, I don’t consider it foul language. Now that you’ve XXXXXed my words, it looks like I said something completely different (and more disparaging) than what I actually said. This is the problem with editing comments, my points do not come through as intended. And you edited more than just the “foul language”, you got the surrounding words too. Properly censored the sentence would look like: “I hope you join myfxbook.com in putting Currensee out of business so we don’t have to watch them smell their own… Read more »
BTW Asaf, I’m waiting on your reply about Stocktwits. Did the tweets have a reference/link to Currensee or not?
Anon, The tweets have a reference to the twitter account of Currensee, not to the website – this is the format of the tweet “Closed LONG $GBPUSD for +9 pips profit; 26% of the @Currensee community volume is trading the GBPUSD with sentiment 35% SHORT #forex” Like I said many times – we are open to change the format to whatever format is going to work for StockTwits but their reply to us was the the format is fine – they don’t see this as advertisement but they just don’t like automated tweets. If you can get to them and… Read more »
One more thing I forgot before you call me a liar.
On the bottom of the tweet it says “less than 10 seconds ago via Currensee TweetMyTrades”
This includes a link to the Currensee website – this is mandatory for app developers of Twitter – but if you also know them as well and ask them how to remove this I would also remove this.
— Asaf.
Asaf, I never even saw the tweets, I just read your blog bashing Stocktwits. But I knew that the tweets promoted your company somehow.. am I really smart? Am I all knowing? No, neither. You are just really transparent. Where do you get the nerve to spam Stocktwits and then write a blog post bashing them? Do you think you are so much smarter than everyone that you can write such a blog without people seeing the situation for what it is? Or are you so entitled that you think your promotion on the backs of other sites is not… Read more »
Well, Again somehow I am feeling this is more personal about you then the StockTweets post I hope you didn’t follow me in the EUR/USD trade last week – it seemed like a good idea at the time. I am not sure where you saw that I claim that I smarter than everyone – However I do feel confident claiming that I am more polite than you and way more transparent as I am not hiding behind an alias or an anonymous tag. How do you interpret this as a spam? if a trader on Currensee would go to your… Read more »
Asaf, you are playing dumb, just like you did in your blog post. Good luck with that approach. Like I said earlier, people can still see you when you have your hand over your eyes.
First I am smart now I am dumb, you’ve called me so many names that I am starting to think you are not really interested in a constructive discussion and are only interested to insult me personally. Lucky for you I am not really getting offended and trying to keep this conversation on the professional level. I’ve answered all of your questions please answer mine 1) Who are you? 2) How can a content that was attributed by some who is not affiliated with Currensee be considered spam? So for example – we have plenty of traders that also, for… Read more »