• 20,000 people in France trade either contracts for difference (CFDs) and/or do retail foreign exchange (FX) trading, comprising 16,000 who trade CFDs and 15,500 trading FX, including 11,500 who do both
• 9,000 people who have not traded before intend to start trading at least one of these products within 12 months
• 38% of current CFD traders had traded warrants before they started trading CFDs
• IG Markets leads in terms of client relationships in the CFD market
• FXCM leads by number of relationships in the FX market

I’ll be there to know what the forex brokers expect from their online campaigns and how I could improve the marketing campaign on Forexticket without overload my pages. I’ll also be in Cyprus to drink a cocktail on the beach

If you work in the forex industry and plan to be in Cyprus between Monday the 28th and thursday the 31th of May, I’ll be happy to discuss with you.

All websites on the Internet have the same evolution. Mobile could reach 30 to 50% in the next 5 years.

How To Best Optimize Your Mobile Site For SEO

• Make It Truly Mobile
• Create A Hybrid Of Mobile-Optimized & Mobile-Friendly Content
• Redirect Appropriately
• Don’t Forget the Images!
• Analyze & Optimize

Making Websites Mobile Friendly

Once upon a time, mobile phones connected to the Internet using browsers with limited rendering capabilities; but this is clearly a changing situation with the fast rise of smartphones which have browsers that rival the full desktop experience. As such, it’s important to note that the distinction we are making here is based on the current situation as we see it and might change in the future.

Consumers love their smartphones. Now businesses must fall in love with mobile.

Smartphone ownership has jumped globally – increasing 11% to 44% of the total population in Spain and by 7% to 38% of the total population in the US.  Smartphone owners are always using their device – in France, 90% use their mobile devices to access the web every day.

[prediction for 2012] More than 1 billion people will use mobile devices as their primary internet access point.

New Study Reveals the Mobile Web Disappoints Global Consumers

Nearly 60% of web users say they expect a website to load on their mobile phone in three seconds or less, and 74% are only willing to wait five seconds or less for a single web page to load before leaving the site. 50% are only willing to wait five seconds or less for an application to load before exiting.

Mobile Site Best Practices

• Keep it Quick
• Simplify navigation
• Be thumb friendly

Untangling Your Mobile Metrics With Better Redirects

Three aspects of this switchboard are worth checking:

• 301 redirects
• Manage user agents
• One-to-one mapping

Since the beginning of 2012 the audience doesn’t stop growing, slowly but surely. Now, my job is to capitalize this momentum and don’t stop innovations.

If you want to change your domain name you should be ready to support a drop in the number of visitors:

• You Don’t Have To Be Nuts To Worry About Changing Your Domain
• Best practices when moving your site
• Achieving an SEO-Friendly Domain Migration – The Infographic
• Surviving a Site Migration [An SEO's Guide]
• Domain Migration – An SEO Case Study

I measured the pages viewed per visit and the load time during the last 9 months to evaluate the impact of the latency. And i found nothing, there is no correlation.

I will continue to improve the load time just to make a good website and not to gain more pages views!

Interesting study about trading and social network

The Dedicated and the Dabblers: How Social Interaction Propagates Active Investing

Our analysis of a new dataset on the activities of retail foreign exchange traders who are participants in a social network supports our hypothesis that social interactions promote the growth of active investment strategies. We apply a population evolution model in which strategies are transmitted through communications between investors and their adoption is motivated by the promise of high returns. The model predicts that the average individual employs increasingly active strategies so long as the propensity to reveal one’s strategies is increasing in realized returns, receivers of communication increase their trading intensity in response to hearing of higher returns, and the volatility of returns for those who are characterized as being active traders are greater than those for whom are not. We confirm the predictions of the model by documenting two novel empirical findings: on average, individual investors are more likely to initiate communications with other investors the greater their returns and they increase their trading intensity upon hearing of good returns.

While in most standard theory the flow of information within networks leads to better performance among market participants, we find that communications between investors may reinforce and even promote reckless trading behavior. This is largely driven by bias found among traders in which they develop forecasts of future returns that are merely extrapolations of the recent performance of assets. This leads them to follow strategies with occasional outstanding results, but that are less protable on average.

During the last 10 years Mataf was my playground. I worked with search engine optimization, online marketing, community management, creating orginal content… I think Mataf was unique in the forex space, most of the trading tools were done before for my personal trading. I developed content I didn’t find somewhere else. And it worked very well, last year I welcomed almost 1 million unique visitors per month in january and march.

The number of visitors was enough strong to take a risk without endangering the future of the site. I decided to build a brand, as the domain name mataf.com was not for sale I completely changed the brand name for ForexTicket. I was aware that this change could drop the number of visitors.

And the number of visitors dropped by 30%. But, thanks Internet’s God, the fall was stabilized and 2012 started -very- well.

Forexticket is a worldwide website. Europe represents more than 50% of the whole visits but Asia (Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, India…) become more important every week.

The mobile version of Forexticket is growing very fast. In december more than 6% of visits are from a smartphone or a tablet and I could reach 7 or 8 percent in january.

So, today we have a new brand, the website should recover all its visitors in the following months. We are strong on mobile and web.

And tomorrow we will be better on mobile and I will try to enhance the brand. We have one distinct website per country, ready to be compliant with all the regulations… And to become an independant broker! … okay, it’s probably a joke, I didn’t plan to transform ForexTicket as a forex broker, I lack some skills and motivation to do that.

• How EURUSD moves during the US session?
• How USD index moves on Monday?

I didn’t find the answer, then I developed the tool. Now I know that EURUSD is moving up during the US session and down in the European night.

That’s cool isn’t it? You can test here: Forex Session

I thought it was an other change in a search engine’s algorithm. But I looked closer where I lost visitors and I can easily concluded that it’s localised in muslim countries.

It’s “Eid-al Adha” from november 6th to the 9th. An important religious day celebrated by muslim.

Eid al-Adha or “Festival of Sacrifice” or “Greater Eid” is an important religious holiday celebrated by Muslims worldwide to commemorate the willingness of Abraham (Ibrahim) to sacrifice his son Ishmael (Isma’il) as an act of obedience to God, before God intervened to provide him with a sheep— to sacrifice instead. (from wikipedia)

Today I learned a new thing… I love web analytics.