A Successful Year for cTrader
Moving into a new calendar year is when nostalgia sets in. As we approach 2020, individuals and businesses around the world are reflecting on the previous year and looking forward to the year ahead of them. cTrader is a trading platform which doesn’t stagnate. Development is continuous and updates just keep coming, one after the other. From where we are standing, it looks like 2019 has been an incredibly busy year for Spotware Systems, the company developing the cTrader platform.
This year, we’ve seen countless updates to the cTrader mobile applications for improving charting, trading and general usability. Even more charting tools have been introduced to the web and desktop versions of the platform. The release of multi-symbol backtesting was by far one of the most demanded and highly anticipated cTrader features of all time. New brokers such as Scandinavian Capital Markets launching the cTrader platform. A series of initiatives to support the cTrader community, such as launching a Telegram channel and a complete makeover of the cTrader community website.
That’s just a few of the highlights. Can we expect as much from Spotware in the year ahead? What’s in store in terms of product development? In this cTrader interview, we catch up with Panagiotis Charalampous, Head of Community Management of cTrader at Spotware to recap on 2019 and find out what’s in store for the year ahead and even further.
cTrader Interview – The Year 2020 and Ahead
With so many releases this year, what would you say is the feature that you are most proud of?
That is true, 2019 was a very busy year in terms of cTrader updates. After a long period of internal work, this year we were able to deliver features long-awaited by traders in all of our applications. We are proud of all the features we have released but if I was to choose one, that would be the Chart Controls in Automate API. The rationale behind my choice is that this is not just another feature but it unlocks a whole range of new possibilities with cTrader and allows traders, as well third party programmers, to build tons of new features on top of the platform.
There have been a number of trends in the forex industry over the years, such as copy trading, stock CFDs and crypto CFDs. cTrader has touched on all of these but none have seems to stick around. What trends does Spotware an eye on at the moment?
It is true that during the last few years we have been experimenting and touching upon different industry trends. However, at the moment the industry seems to be facing dramatic changes. Shrinking volumes, restrictive regulations and general market consolidation force us to go back to the drawing board and focus on the basic pillar of our success which is the premium and transparent trading experience we offer daily to millions of traders. Despite the numerous features we have delivered during 2019, there is still a huge backlog of long-awaited additions for all cTrader apps and that is where our focus will be for 2020 as well. What the industry needs now is a robust and flawless trading experience within a single trading environment. And this what we plan to offer.
Despite eToro seeming to do very well in this area, it looks as if the rest of the industry has kept Copy Trading at arm’s length. A lot of work must have gone into developing cTrader Copy, what do you think is the future for this service?
It has been a year since we have released cTrader Copy and we have seen nothing but growth, both in terms of available strategies and volume traded through the service. We also do recognise that copy trading is a field with great challenges ahead, the most important being unclear regulations that cause scepticism to brokers and distrust from traders towards such services. However, we firmly believe that the democratization of the investment sector is the future of the industry, thus copying services like cTrader Copy will be a necessity. Therefore we remain committed to developing cTrader Copy further.
We have seen the scope of the cTrader Automate API extend a lot this year. Do you see the gap between cTrader and MetaTrader 4 closing? How far do you think cTrader is from overtaking MetaTrader in terms of functionality?
Indeed, we are investing a lot in cTrader Automate. We want to enable the community to develop sophisticated trading robots as well as build their own unique products that will enrich the product’s ecosystem. Regarding the comparison with MetaTrader , our development agenda is completely led by user demand and user feedback. We want our platform to meet the needs of current and potential users and allow them to execute their trading strategies. We prefer to keep traders happy rather than completing a checkbox list.
I’m sure you are tired of being asked this question. Are there still no plans to redesign cTrader to be compatible with Mac and Linux? If not natively, but at least through the use of compatibility tools such as WINE.
Indeed we are being asked this very often and the answer might also sound familiar 🙂 We do not have short term plans for a Mac and Linux based cTrader. Currently, the demand for this compared to the effort required does not justify prioritizing this above the rest of the features in our backlog.
What can we look forward to in 2020? More order types, such as OCO? Price based charts, such as Renko?
We plan to continue at the same pace in 2020 as we did in 2019. The theme for 2020 is an improved charting experience across all our products. Some features that traders should expect early in 2020 are a revamped chart object management process in desktop and web, Renko and Range bars on mobile apps. We also intend to start working on a cTrader plugins feature but it is still very soon to reveal any more details about this.
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