What’s new in the forex industry?
Interesting post in Maoxian’s blog
Realistic Subscriber Numbers
I have said that I’d like to make $100,000 a year from my weekly newsletter. At $200 a subscriber that means I need 500 people willing to pay me. Assuming the same .77% conversion rate, I’d need 65,000 people to “register” first which means what in terms of traffic? We know from my pathetic stats that the website only gets 20,000 visitors a month with 10,000 uniques. I’d need at least ten times that number to find 500 subscribers. (200,000 visitors > 65,000 registered > 500 paid subscribers)
I experimented the same frustration at the beginning of Mataf
I have less visitors this month but some interesting numbers…
I received a bad news from a member of Mataf this morning. I’m banned from Iran 
This morning I learned that Saxo Bank will completly acquire the EuroInvestor portal. They pay a huge amount but I think this a very good move a broker can do now on Internet.
I keep in mind the acquisition of Boursorama by Fimatex (Société Générale) in France at the beginning of 2002. The price was very high : 44 millions Euro (x36 price-earnings – to compare with x32 for EuroInvestor). This acquisition has helped Fimatex to grow faster (108’000 account in 2001 vs 677’000 account in 2010) and to become the leader in trading online in France.
After my short experience with Synthesis Bank (now Saxo Switzerland) in 2006 I was not far to change the business model of Mataf.net. I thought about the opportunity to become a forex broker. I had a strong forex portal and the skills to optimize the website to collect leads. The choice between forex broker and portal was not easy but I think I made the better choice a the right time… My motivation is to build something, not to make a ton of money.
Today I see 5 differents business in the forex market:
If I had no limit my strategy would be:
This is a complete strategy: You perfectly know the forex traders, you can offer them what they want, you have a source of leads, and you have a good trading platform.
OK it’s not enought to be a broker… but it a very good start.
I think, and I hope, that Saxo will follow this line with the acquisition of EuroInvestor.
If I had enough money I would certainly acquire a broker to do the same thing 
According to Google Ad Planner, here is the number of visitors in forex portals in january 2011.
I have now 12 months history of number of visits and we can see a lot of information.
Don’t forget that those numbers are just an indicator, they are not real numbers -Mataf didn’t grows from 1 million visits to 1.2 million (+20% ) but from 1.12 million to 1.46 million (+30%).- but it’s interesting to compare our website with the same tool.
December is always a bad month for forex portals. In 2010 most of the website I follow had a drop in the number of visitors. But 2010 seems to be a fantastic year for myfxbook.com and forexpros, they both had a perfect trend month after month.
2011 had started very well with a strong growth. This week the average of the number of visitors is not far from the highest of last year, which is a good indicator.
The mobile version of Mataf.net is online !!! I have this job in my todo list since many months… and it takes only 3 days of work. Shame on me
Ready for the Wow effect? Go to Mataf Mobile (it’s better with an iPhone or an Android… I didn’t test on WP7).
This is the number of unique visitors on Mataf.net since july 2007. The number of visitors is growing naturally but I can improve or deteriorate the trend with my SEO experimentation!
I work on a new SEO improvement for next year, I hope it won’t be a mistake
Read the news on Francesc’s blog.
2001 = $10 Billion
2009 = $165 Billion
2010 = $200 Billion
It represents a yearly growth of 40% (and not 200% as Francesc said 
) but “only” +20% between 2009 and 2010. Is it the end of the trend ?
