London: Forex Magnates London bureau were at Day 1 of Trade Tech FX. Industry professionals were paying attention to the wide range of discussion taking place throughout the day.

The predominantly institutional crowd was given a taste of the growing retail FX market, Tim Haman the CEO of Fair Trading Technology gave a presentation on FTT and what they offer, the presentation was informative and it kept listeners interested with Tim’s humour and analogies. He described the Metatrader 4 platform as the “AK47 of Algo Trading”.

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The retail market is believed to be responsible for 11% or nearly $350 billion in daily trade volumes in the FX markets. Tim’s presentation discussed the issues and difficulties with retail FX brokers and how the market is maturing, with growth and sophistication Retail FX traders needs are changing and FTT believes it has the solutions.

The pre lunch panelist discussion looked at the differences and similarities between Single Dealer Portals and Multi Dealer Portals, the panel consisted of highly acclaimed industry experts from the buy-side and ECN sectors. Experts were discussing how the ECN market is getting heavily fragmented with an influx of new platforms from banks and inter dealer brokers, all looking to create a competitor to EBS or Reuters.

Panelist James Rockall, Head of Trading at Record Currency Management spoke about the difficulties trading forwards via an ECN as the prices are not streamed.

The event was attended by a large number of buy side firms along with software developers and prime brokers.

Tom Higgins CEO of Gold-i a technology solutions provider for Retail and Institutional derivatives firms believes “the exhibition is an excellent place for us to meet potential clients and start introducing our wide range of products to people who we normally don’t interact with”.

Denis Borisovskiy CEO of ProTrader a software development firm travelled from Ukraine, he said “I wasn’t sure what to expect, however it has been an interesting conference as I have met with many individuals who are active in the FX markets”.

Day 2 will have another dose of useful topics including HFT in FX, systematic trading and FX Options.