Rating: 20 per cent of trades are now mobile says Joshua Raymond
Along with using mobile phones to bet on horse racing, another early established use for the mobile web was to use smartphones to bet on stocks and shares. And over here in Blighty (the UK), the handset which helped build this market was RIM’s BlackBerry. How things have changed it seems. Writing for the City A.M. newspaper, Joshua Raymond, chief market strategist with City Index, outlines how things have changed radically in terms of using smartphones to make trades on the stock markets. For example, Raymond reveals that,”Three years ago, the average volume of trades we [City Index] took from clients via their mobile device was just 2 per cent, while less than one in ten clients actually used their mobile devices to trade. Today, that figure is much higher and the iPhone appears to be responsible for a radical rise in usage.Nowadays, the volume of trades which Cit Index receives from mobile devices stands at 20 per cent and with one in three clients using their mobile devices to trade. Moreover that figure continues to rise.
As Raymond says, “Today you can trade wherever you are, while researching positions with interactive charts and financial news direct from the palm of your hand.”
Rather than the Palm in your hand, of course. We doubt whether more than a handful of traders are actually using an HP Pre or TouchPad with webOS – the successor to Palm, of course.
So what has cause this radical change? Raymond hints at the real answer.
“Before the launch of the iPhone, most mobile platforms were fairly average with poor usability and a lack of trading tools to make the most out of trading on the move,” he says.
Yup. It’s been the introduction of mobile web friendly devices like the iPhone and the consequent blossoming of mobile apps that have helped to make mobile trading so much easier to do.
Raymond also predicts that, “In addition, the advent of tablet trading is expected to further increase the volume of trades being placed outside of more conventional forms of trading.”
He then goes onto to provide his Top Five Dos & Don’ts of mobile trading. You can read them here. We’ll only mention one of them.
Raymond warns mobile City Index users that they can adjust their security settings to protect their accounts in the event that their smartphone gets lost or stolen.
There’s a general consensus that the favourite place for City traders to lose their smartphones is in the back of a Black cab (taxi).
