Firstrade, an online brokerage firm, has partnered with Trading Central, a provider of market research and analytics, to equip retail investors with expanded suite of investment analysis tools.
Don Montanaro, President of Firstrade, said the new partnership significantly enhances the experience for Firstrade’s self-directed investors.
The integration will incorporate Trading Central’s solutions including: Technical Insight that uses best practices of technical analysis to identify trends, patterns, and historical price changes; Market & News (Market Buzz) that enhances news interaction, utilizing AI to amalgamate updates from diverse sources and applying advanced sentiment analysis; Strategy Builder that empowers investors to conduct research, define criteria, and apply filters to identify strategies; as well as Calendar (Economic Insight) that offers investors a streamlined view of important economic events, presented through simple charts and a personalized calendar.
“Our clients are making faster but better-informed investment decisions, executing their trading strategies with both greater confidence and efficiency,” commented Montanaro.
“Advanced analytics are now super approachable in our Technical Insights section. We’re using AI to synthesize vast amounts of news into easily digestible chunks we call Market Buzz,” he added.
Montanaro told Traders Magazine that throughout his career he has seen market information, sophisticated yet accessible tools and access to more and more asset classes and trading strategies move downstream from institutional to retail.
“Time and again, retail traders demonstrate that they can indeed compete, profit and win,” he said.
“There are differences in scale and resources, but well-armed retail clients are leveraging technology and access to information to get off the porch and run with the big dogs every single day,” he added.
According to Montanaro, the difference between the retail and institutional trading experience was once as stark as comparing analog to digital.
“I am old enough to have gotten quotes from a newspaper, trading against pros with information streamed to their computers. The gap gets narrower and narrower every year; indeed now every month, week and day,” he said.
“The major trend I now see is the same one driving the markets higher right now, the thing we read and hear about around every corner – it’s AI,” he added.
He believes AI deployments can and will narrow the last of the meaningful information and resource advantages that institutional traders have over retail.
“We’re excited to be part of this next wave, and we’re infusing the newest tech into every step we take these days here at Firstrade,” he said.
