Tradingviews.com is a new and interesting service by MB Trading. It’s based on the foundations of Wizetrade – a trading education company MB Trading acquired a while ago.
Tradingviews.com’s claim to fame is its trial to deliver TV-like news channel over the internet. It’s what they call IPTV. Most of the site’s focus is on several dozens of experts who provide an ongoing live coverage of the markets (Forex and Stocks). The experts provide technical and fundamental explanations and opinions regarding the market moves, trends and expected developments. The TV is a high quality transmission with the help of Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. The experts also run a panel and answer incoming calls from traders – which is very interesting and useful.
Furthermore, the site offers featured articles from its experts, economic calendar and market updates. Additionally, and what I like most with this website, is its B2C feature – traders can buy DVDs, books and register for specific seminars (and there are many of these). I suppose MB offers these experts not only salary (or pay per performance) but also an opportunity to market their own products this way keeping everybody happy.
The service also offers a social element – traders can chat with experts or their peers, ask questions, receive a newsletter and participate in a traders community.
All in all, it’s a pretty useful service for hard core traders who enjoy watching TV or listening to this as if it was radio and switching back to watching when there’s something interesting they’d like to view.
For MB this is obviously a completely new form of a marketing channel. Unlike some other brokers who maintain their own portals (dailyfx for FXCM and fx360 for GFT) – MB decided to go with something completely different, and more interactive.
I can see a few advantages as well as disadvantages here:
1. It’s a free and pretty useful service which can run in the background while you are working/trading.
2. It’s a smart business move by MB which should help it open quite a few new accounts.
3. It’s also an additional revenue stream for MB allowing to offer more products than just brokerage. I’m sure MB and experts share on sold goodies such as DVDs and seminars.
On the other hand:
1. It’s a very expensive service to maintain – TV channel is an expensive service with high fixed costs and experts don’t come for cheap (unless they are compensated just by selling their additional services like seminars and books, which I doubt).
2. The channel is very broad in its focus – it talks about Forex, Stocks, ETFs and several more products. This fits MB’s strategy as an all-in-one broker but some traders are looking for a more specific content. This bring me to another point: it would be interesting to see MB launch dedicated channels for Fundamental or Technical Analysis although this can prove to be highly expensive too.
Michael,
Thanks for the post about TradingViews. The feedback so far from viewers has been fantastic and as the site continues to grow, look for us to add additional market experts and educators to work along side with John Persons, Alan Farley and Toni Turner.
A really nice feature you left out is the fact traders can detach the TV player from the browser, and if anyone misses a show, they can watch it OnDemand in the video section of the site.