The Foreign Exchange, or Forex, market has been hot in recent years with a surge of new retail investors entering the market.  Gain Capital Group, founded in 1999, has been servicing this growing interest through its two Web portals, Gain Capital, its service for professional traders, and Forex.com, Gain’s retail division for self-directed individual investors. The company recently launched a Microsoft-based next generation margin trading platform called FOREXTrader for Windows. We spoke to Andrew Haines, vice president of application development for Gain Capital Group about the new platform and the decision to launch it with Microsoft technology.

Andrew Haines, vice president of application development, Gain Capital Group

The foreign exchange market has surged in recent years. How have changes in the market played out in terms of demands on your platform?

The clients that are using the platform have a broader array of skills in trading. We are seeing more people who are new to trading, and on the novice end so we have to make sure the platform is extremely intuitive and user-friendly and provides more tools that help our clients make trading decisions and manage their positions. On the other hand, our seasoned traders are very aware of what they want and are looking for the best platform: mainly a fast, stable platform with low latency, the ability to customize the platform to their trading style, and advanced order and charting functionality. We are pushing our platform so we can meet the needs of very different classes of users in one platform.

Your release described FOREXTrader as the most robust feature-rich platform you’ve ever offered. What were some of your goals in creating this new platform?

Early in the development process, we focused on the client experience; the idea being that a rich user interface would draw in prospective clients. We also wanted to use standard Windows conventions so that first time users would be comfortable with the menu structure, toolbar, right mouse context menus, and so on.

We also needed to make some major improvements to our charting tool, which is a critical feature for our client base of active Forex traders. With the new version, it is easier to view multiple currency pairs and multiple time frames in the charts. You can see a Euro daily, one hour and one minute chart at the same time. You can go from the Euro to the Canadian dollar to the New Zealand dollar chart in one click.

Besides this, the trade execution is done through a Web services business transaction layer. We have had a Web services API exposed to black box trading clients for years and it is considered to be one of the best in the industry. Now, we use these Web services ourselves from FOREXTrader for order execution. We were initially concerned about switching from a synchronous socket connection to an asynchronous Web service because transaction speed is really a number one priority for us. But, execution times have not been impacted and our trading architecture is componentized.

Why did you choose Microsoft technology in developing FOREXTrader?

We are primarily a Windows shop. Most of our in-house execution and risk management applications have been built on the .NET platform. We use Visual Studio 2005 as our development environment and the vast majority of our browser-based applications are built on ASP.NET. We also do some Java development and have a Java trading platform that we have offered to clients for eight years, but we found that we can go from concept to deployment more rapidly using the Microsoft toolset.

What were some of the benefits you realized from using Microsoft in development?

Building this in Visual Studio (VS) and leveraging third party .NET controls allowed us to prototype this quickly with less effort than it would have taken if we had built it in Java. VS allows us to do drag and drop development. Rather than having to build from scratch, we can pull in components that are ready-made. This takes much of the grunt work out of coding and allows us to focus more on business functionality.

Also, the ClickOnce technology within the .NET Framework handles the download, set up and subsequent updates to FOREXTrader. There is little-to-no effort in terms of set up. Plus, ClickOnce installations do not require that the installer has administrative access. All we have to do is publish an update to the platform; the next time a user logs in, the system checks our servers for new releases and automatically downloads and installs the update. It requires very little effort to deploy and provides a seamless customer experience.

FOREXTrader was tested with select clients before its release. What type of feedback did you get from the beta tests?

First, back in October, we did an internal alpha test to friends and family. The quick feedback we found, besides some minor bugs by our own team, was that people wanted more flexibility. We made the follow-up versions easier to use and added more robust customization tools. We now allow users to drag and drop components around the screen and save their own custom templates. Pretty much any frame can now be torn off completely, minimized or moved to their preferred screen position.

www.forex.com

www.gaincapital.com