The first part of the review of Currensee included the review of the product itself. Here, in the second part, I bring questions and answers from Currensee CEO Dave Lemont. I also review some drawbacks of the product.
Drawbacks
While the idea is great and the implementation are great, I still have two remarks. First, the performance of the site isn’t good enough. I have to wait too much time for a pages to load. In the fast world of forex trading, this is a problem that should be solved, and is a must for scaling up to a large community. Other Web 2.0 sites have optimized performance and work swiftly. I’m sure that the engineers at Currensee will solve it.
The second remark is on a much smaller scale: I’d prefer seeing the ratio between the winning and losing traders by the number of traders rather than by volume. Being a social site, I prefer to measure the community by the amount of people rather than by the amount of money. One single big trader can change the picture in the current configurations.
How did forex brokers agree to join?
In a pre-brief with Currensee’s CEO Dave Lemont, the first question that popped up was: how were forex brokers able to agree to this openness. They allow their traders to expose their positions to the world.
Lemont answered that Currensee community will help forex traders make more profits, therefore making the brokers more money via spreads. Also the community features make traders more comfortable with forex trading, thus making them stay longer with the brokers.
I guess that some brokers really make money off the spreads. Such brokers would probably love to collaborate with Currensee. But some brokers just wait for their customers to lose and wipe out their accounts. I’m not sure that such brokers would be too keen to join Currensee…
As seen beforehand, Currensee has superb statistical features: they can slice and dice data in fantastic ways. Will they allow seeing profit and loss sliced by forex brokers? If this would happen, it would be an even bigger step of transparency in the forex industry.
Currensee’s Business Model
Currently, there are very few Google AdSense advertisements on Currensee. They currently don’t intrude, and they are a very low price to pay for Currensee’s excellent features. Apparently this isn’t enough to maintain such a sophisticated site.
In the near future, Currensee will feature various collaborations with forex brokers such as affiliate programs and premium services. Currently, everything is free to use. I’ll update on additional enhancements.
Bottom line
Currensee is an excellent tool for forex traders. Bringing social media to forex trading took a long time. As far as I know, Currensee are pioneers in this field, and it sure was worth waiting. The sophisticated features and the great transparency that’s missing in the forex industry make it worth checking out, if not using it constantly.
Now open to the public, I highly recommend checking it out.
Here’s the first part of the Currensee.
Further reading:
- Currensee’s About page – See the people behind the company.
- Casey Stubbs’ review – Casey is one of the users in the private beta.
- The Networking Blog – A blog all about networking, online and offline, which I co-author.