Technology :: Transparent Networking Comes to Financial Sites

The Web 2.0 revolution is reaching the financial sector. It’s not only forums and chat rooms, and not another Twitter application for stocks. This time it’s about revealing trades in real time. One sector is standing out: forex. Trading currencies has been around for a few decades, but it was limited to big financial institutions. The internet, among other things, brought this niche of financial investment (or speculation if you wish) to the masses.

There’s lots of innovation around forex trading platforms, so this served as good ground for networking sites as well. In 2009 and 2010, these networking sites went deeper – deep into the pockets of investors. Similar to applications such as Google Latitude that expose your geographical location, these sites expose data. But it’s not only forex. Let’s see some examples:

1. MT4Pips: These are lots of weird names in Web 2.0, and this name is not only Web 2.0-ish, but uses the forex jargon. MT is MetaTrader, the leading software in this field. Using this site, traders that use this specific software can share their real live trades between each other. This site comes from a company that already made a Digg-like site for forex, has a forums site and more social sites in this field.  The options are somewhat basic, and are limited to this specific platform, but are a great and neat start. Here’s a deeper review of this site.
2. PT Multistation: This is a software that enables traders to use multiple brokers at once. They recently added social features that allow traders (in foreign exchange, stocks and others) to chat and also to share real trades. This tool already allows multiple brokers and goes beyond the niche of forex, but the social features still require improvement, according to this review. Also here, a good direction that still needs polishing.
3. Currensee: Focusing only on the forex sector, this site enables sharing of real time trades and has tools for aggregating the numbers and showing the big picture. While this isn’t limited to a specific software, not all the brokers in the industry are available there. They are adding more and more brokers, and improving the design, so this will probably emerge as the leading tool for social networking in forex. But we guess that most of you aren’t investing in this specific niche but rather in stocks. The last options supports more sectors.

All in all, we have nice starts here with each one taking a different direction. We hope that this trend of transparency will reach stock sites as well. Do you know of any sites like these? We’d love to hear.