Forex Kills

There was an interesting discussion on Forexmagnates between Asaf from currensee and Francesc from Fxstreet

Asaf
I can’t imagine why anyone would ever compare Forex Factory to FXStreet. (…)
Forex Factory is merely an economic calendar and a commercial forum for the brokers to “socialize” their marketing through.

ChaterTe
I totally agree, Forex Factory is run by marketers and brokers 95% of the content/post their is produced by brokers and their army of in-house sales teams and IB’s.

AshFX
Guys, you have to be fair to Forex Factory. 95% of the posts aren’t by brokers/sales teams.

Francesc Riverola
For one time I can not agree with you Asaf.
I agree that FF has been a pioneer in the FX industry along FXS. The site has reached a tipping point that I can not understand the retail Forex industry without it. (…)
I do not know why he rather to be behind the scene…, my policy has always been being in front of the scene and being in contact with our users to listen to them and to help them, but I think his strategy or way of doing things is as good or as bad as mine.

Asaf
(…) if you look at all the senior members in FF you’d see that they have their own site and they either sell signals, have a chatroom, or manage money. FF is a very fertile ground that nurtures fraud in this market not because they are bad people but because of the nature of the market and the lack of transparency (…)
FF was probably a great solution 5 or 10 years ago when the market just started, these days it’s absolutely the wrong solution and a negative force in this market

Francesc Riverola
it is not just a problem for FF but for most of existent Forex site. This even affects us as when you accept articles/research/opinion from 3rd parties and you do not audit their track record, unfortunate from time to time you get very bad surprises.

Asaf
The best we can do is to work together as people who care about this industry and join forces while being considerate to our own businesses because the expansion of this market is largely depends on the ability to weed out some of the scammers that operate in it

This is why Mataf is still a personal website and why I don’t promote the forum and news from third parties. I prefer to work on my own content!

1 Comment » Posted by Arnaud Jeulin / Non classé

June was not as good as May. The EURUSD consolidation hit the statistics. The only site with a constant growth is forexpros, but this is also the only site with a section about stock and ETF.

It seems that july won’t be very good for the forex industry and very bad for Mataf. 3 weeks ago I have modified the link structure of the website which dropped most of my positions in several search engine… The mistake is corrected now but I lost arround 30% of the visitors in only 3 days and they didn’t come back for the time being.

4 Comments » Posted by Arnaud Jeulin / forex industry and statistics

May has been an exceptional month for most of the forex portals. June started very well but the number of visitors fall week after week… I hope I’m not alone!

5 Comments » Posted by Arnaud Jeulin / forex industry and statistics

Last week I met Andrey Duka (from Dukascopy) at the Geneva Forex Event. I was very pleased to learn that M. Duka knows and really appreciates Mataf. It was enought for a succesful evening.

No Comments » Posted by Arnaud Jeulin / about

The worldcup has a negative effect on the number of visitors. Last friday for the opening ceremony and the 2 firsts match Mataf had a fall of 10%.

On saturday and sunday I had the same “worldcup effect”… And it will certainly continue until  the 11th of july!

2 Comments » Posted by Arnaud Jeulin / statistics

Last month I changed the homepage and I wrote

This is the first step of the most important move since Mataf exists.

And today, after weeks and weeks of work, I have pushed a version of Mataf in 51 languages. I have several motivations in this project:

• The first motivation is the technical challenge. Mataf.net was designed for 6 languages. It was hard coded. I re-wrote most of the functions and files to accept an illimited number of languages. And Yes, I’m very happy because it works!
• I also wanted to open Mataf to the Asian market. I know that most of traders in Asia speaks english but I also know that most of people prefers to read in their mother tongue. I think I can have more visitors from Asia than Europe. I was conforted in that idea when I read the interview of Drew Niv (CEO of FXCM)

Well, traditionally FXCM has been very strong in Asian countries. Actually our Asian business is bigger than our North American business; over 45% of our clients come from Asia. We have a hugh presence in Asia

• Saxo Bank seems to have an important number of clients in Russia, Arabia and Greece… And now, I offer those languages!

• I have to found a new leverage to increase the number of visitors on Mataf.

My target is to double the number of visitors on Mataf in one year. Last month, which was an excellent month, I had 1.430M visits, 4.475 M pageviews and 0.93 M unique visitors. In May 2011 I expect arround 3M visits, 10M pageviews and 2M unique visitors. This is my impossible challenge

The translation is not perfect but I will improve that point in the next months…

6 Comments » Posted by Arnaud Jeulin / about and forex industry

Most of the webmaster in the forex industry should follow the traffic statistics of fxstreet (I do since 3 years). Francesc gives detailled stats each month. It’s a nice benchmark for me. I don’t worry about strong drop or growth in the number of visitors if Fxstreet have the same variation.

Since the beginning of this year Google adplanner seems to give not bad data for the number of visits. I will publish some data every month to follow the evolution of the forex’s audience.

You have to take care with those data because Google use several approximations… But it could be a nice benchmark because every website have the same approximations.

Forex Global Statistics

2 Comments » Posted by Arnaud Jeulin / forex industry and statistics

Mataf has a new homepage since few minutes. It’s shorter, clearer and designed for my tools and analysis. And… This page is the same for all the languages. Now Mataf is ready to receive new translation.

This is the first step of the most important move since Mataf exists.

No Comments » Posted by Arnaud Jeulin / about

Mataf's uptime in March 2010

March was a good month for the response time which fall from 1050ms to 550ms. But I had a big downtime at the beginning of march.

Despite this bad news I had more than 800k unique visitors this month. I will certainly need a load balancer with 2 servers soon…

No Comments » Posted by Arnaud Jeulin / statistics

I told you that I have to improve the response time of Mataf.net… 3 hours of work and it’s done:

Response time of Mataf.net

2 Comments » Posted by Arnaud Jeulin / Non classé