A trade signal platform : case of foreign exchange trading

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement of Degree of Masters of Science in Mobile Telecommunication and InnovationOnline Foreign Exchange is the exchanging of one currency for another at a specified rate. The foreign exchange market is considered the most liquid market in the world. Trading the it bears a lot of challenges and risk making the business very risky to new traders. It is estimated that 95% of the total population of online traders in this market lose their money while attempting to venture into the business. This percentage is too large to ignore and hence this study sought to understand the reason as to why many traders are unsuccessful in FX trading and develop a foreign exchange signal platform that can be used by expert traders to deliver notifications about upcoming potentially profitable trades inform of signal/alerts with data based on market analysis to new traders to help them make informed trades. The study also sought to understand the limitation of existing similar platforms and how modern software design approaches such as micro-services and instant notification platform can be used to develop a more efficient and cost effective foreign exchange signal platform. The design of this research used both quantitative and qualitative research methods to carry out the study. The finding of this research were that many traders fail because of taking too much risk, poor or no trade management skills, lack of mastery in trading methods, unrealistic expectations and limited understanding of technical and fundamental market analysis skills among other reasons. To address these problems, the research used the agile software design methodology to develop a foreign exchange signal platform that would allow new traders to subscribe to expert traders who can send potentially profitable trade signals based on expert analysis. The platform monitors these trades against a live market exchange rate feed and notifies the subscribers of any change of states of the trades. The results from the user test questionnaires revealed that the developed system delivered better user experience and was more efficient as compared to other similar platforms