For the second year, FXstreet.com will nominate its “Forex Person of the Year”. The idea is to pay tribute to a person, a team of people or a project that has positively contributed to make the Forex world a better place in 2012. The market is huge and full of professionals who work every day to make the business easier and better… for the Forex trader. Our focus has been innovation, transparency and quality, and not necessarily going for the most famous names.
We present to you today the 4 finalists on our list.
This is a short list, and we’re aware that many other teams and people could have been nominated. However, it’s biased by our sensibility, our work, and our own criteria. We appreciate that every single trader or professional in the sector has his or her own person of the year, and that’s the beauty of it. Next week we will announce who we’ve finally elected for this title, and we can assure you that it´s going to be tough for us to decide!
We would like to thank and congratulate the following people especially for their great contribution to the Forex market.
Gal Ron from ConversionPros and Michael Greenberg from Forex Magnates
In May 2012, the first iFXEXPO took place in Limassol, Cyprus. This event, organized by ConversionPros, was the very first B2B expo for the Forex industry and brought together 1,200 service providers and brokers.
Later in the year, in November, Michael Greenberg’s Forex Magnates Summit 2012 was held in London and proved to be a huge success too. It gathered 350 CEO’s and top executives of the forex market, something that is not simple nowadays in an increasingly connected world. Michael Greenberg’s challenge was to convince the “big fishes” to meet on one day, in one place, and impressively, everybody was there (550 attendees in total).
After that success, ConversionPros teamed up with Forex Magnates to organize another event in January 2013, in Macau this time. The event, which was attended by over 1,250 visitors and 55 exhibitors and sponsors, brought together Asian brokers and vendors together with foreign technology and liquidity providers.
Gal Ron is the CEO and Founder of ConversionPros, a company whose mission statement is to help large and small online businesses succeed within the aggressive and fast paced online world, in particular in Forex Marketing and binary options marketing. Michael Greenberg is the Founder of Forex Magnates, the largest B2B portal in the Forex industry. Michael launched Forex Magnates in 2009 as a simple blog in an effort to bring more transparency to the Forex market. Ever since, the humble project has grown into a well known portal providing daily news, commentary and research about the Forex industry in 7 languages.
In 2013, summits in Cyprus, London and Tokyo will be held by these two companies.
Andrey Pavlov and Ilya Holeu, founders of cTrader
cTrader is a fully customizable trading platform. This product takes a further step toward transparency in the market creation process and the functions offered by the platform makes it more versatile than other existing trading platforms by offering micro-lots, inverted spreads or partial executions, to offer but a few examples. These characteristics don’t constrain the trader and force them to adopt all-in all-out or over-leveraged strategies.
Other advantages of the product are direct market access, mobile access, cloud hosting for algorithmic trading and the fact it is C# programmable.
cTrader is a product developped by Spotware Systems, a neutral financial technology provider focusing on e-FX STP and direct-access trading, offering comprehensive solutions for brokers, banks and their clients. It is a member of FIX Protocol and ISO27001 Certified.
The people behind cTrader are Andrey Pavlov, CEO of Sptoware Systems, and Ilya Holeu, Head of Sales and Marketing, Spotware Systems.
Andrey Pavlov brings 15 years of experience in the financial services industry to Spotware Systems, where his company delivers high-performing manual and algorithmic trading platforms to banks and brokers,servicing both institutional and retail traders. Andrey has built and sold a number of companies, including Arbatek, a major e-services provider in Eastern Europe, acquired by the RBC Group in 2007.
Ilya Holeu began an industrious FX career after earning his degree in Marketing & BA from Intercollege (University of Nicosia) in Cyprus, quickly setting to work on making an impact in FX which has now brought him more than 9 years of industry experience. Currently, Ilya works on improving financial technologies as Head of Sales and Marketing at Spotware.
Lior Nabat, Founder and CEO of Tradency
Lior Nabat founded Tradency Inc. together with Udi Gershon in 2005. Tradency is a financial technology provider of innovative trading solutions and was the first to invent the Mirror Trading concept. The MirrorTrader, Tradency’s advanced trading platform, enable traders to automate their trading and base their decisions on the actions of track-record proven expert strategies.
In February 2012, Tradency decided to change its business model: instead of charging brokers volume-based fees, it now charges technology fees (which would then allow brokers to focus on client acquisition).
Brokers seem to understand and like the potential of this change, and the Tradency platform was successfully implemented by new brokers along the year 2012. Tradency is now part of the offering of FXCM, CTFX, Invast, Sec, FXDD, Forex.com, Ava, Fibo, Markets, Gain, to name a few. Additionally, since December 2012, the powerful and visually appealing platform is now supporting CFDs, including commodities like Gold and Oil, equity indexes, and individual stocks.
Tradency was launched years ago, but 2012 certainly was a successful year in its history, marked by an important expansion due to a business model change that proved to be smart and effective.
Jannick Malling, CEO of tradable
tradable trading platform was made public for the first time in November 2012. Unique in his genre, tradable is an app-based platform. It offers an applications store open to both clients and developers. As in iTunes, tradable will take a commission on what developers receive from selling the apps. Brokers that want to propose the platform to their clients will be charged a licensing fee and traders will be able to use their favorite applications to create their personal trading platforms. The product was launched last week.
The mind behind this project is Jannick Malling, a 25-year-old Danish entrepreneur. He co-founded tradable with a mission to create the OS for trading, giving traders the most personalized trading experience yet by merging the world best trading technology with the best of the Internet and its latest trends: simple, social, mobile, cloud and app-powered innovation.
The Financial Times said that “This “appification” of trading could be the next chapter for a sector that typically sees slim margins and relies on heavy trading volumes.” Time will tell, but the product looks very promising
A great list of finalists! I know Michsel Greenberg personally and he certainly does an amazing job.