Forex Kills

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 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

We just re-launched the forex brokers comparison tool. Flo built this tool last year but we had some technical problems which are now fixed.

As every webmasters I wanted to add a fx brokers comparison section on my website but I didn’t want to update the data manually.  I also didn’t want to use broker’s API. Our target was to reproduce exactly what I see on the trading platform. We found only one solution: OCR -Optical Character Recognition-

The process is quite simple but it’s not the easiest way. We have a dedicated computer with the trading platforms, we make a screen shot every ten seconds, we send the picture to our server and the OCR translates the picture to text.

We had technical problems on each step.

• Our office is not as big as fxstreet’s, I had to find a place to put the computer with 2 screens. Don’t laugh, it was a really problem.
• We search and find a wonderful software to make the screen shot: SnagIt.
• SnagIt can send the picture with FTP but we encountered several problems. If our server cuts the communication, SnagIt stops the process. I use “Cobian Backup” to send the files.
• Images are processed to remove unnecessary parts. The OCR system is developed in C. It took several months to be optimized.

And now I have a great tool to compare the price and the spread offered by forex brokers. To see how the price and the spread moves during the news. And finally I want to compare the bid/ask of each brokers to see if I can find an indicator for my personal trading.

If you are a broker and if you want to be included in this tool, I would be very pleased to have a real account (even without money)…

You can find similar tools on the Internet but never as detailled:

• Mataf – the best
• FXIntel – Not bad but useless for trading
• Oanda – a marketing tool… the spread during the news release is the most interesting

Forex brokers comparison

4 Comments » Posted by Arnaud Jeulin / forex industry