Tradier, a cloud-based financial services provider and brokerage API company, has launched Futures Trading, expanding its existing offering for retail investors.
The new offering is in beta version, with a full launch expected for April.
According to Dan Raju, CEO of Tradier, the next generation of futures traders are looking for better choice, functionality, and transparent pricing.
“Tradier’s Futures platform will be an alternative to the existing vertical offerings in the market that have lost focus on digitizing the customer experience,” he told Traders Magazine.
“We want to empower traders with a better and transparent one stop shop for their investing,” he added.
Raju said that the futures industry has organically layered up to what it has today with back office technical limitations creating friction for traders.
“There is room for us to take a step back and relook at the tech stack,” he said.
Another driving factor is the consolidation of the industry in the last decade with most of the time and focus spent on shuffling traders between firms, he added.
“Our equity customers are active in the market and have always – and continue to – come to us because they have graduated away from traditional vertical brokers due to costs, missing service and limited functionality,” he said.
This launch, Raju said, will make it convenient for advanced traders to move their whole trading account, including futures positions, to Tradier, “providing an overall better experience”.
“We expect our traders to engage in outright futures, spread trades and options on futures,” he said.
According to Raju, the demand for futures trading is skyrocketing amongst retail investors.
He said that retail trading volume in futures contracts on US exchanges is 50% higher compared to pre-pandemic levels.
“Traders who jumped into retail self-directed apps during and after the pandemic are now graduating to expand their asset classes into instruments like futures,” he said.
“More traders are now engaged in micro-sized contracts than ever before. You have a perfect play of traders, volumes and tech driven opportunities hitting the market,” he added.
Raju stressed that technology and simplification of user experiences, lower fees, broader education combined with the graduation effect is catalyzing retail investors towards futures.
For example, he said, countries like India have spearheaded retail futures growth.
“We want to support our traders with some of the best tools and offer something unique. They want choices at a low cost, which is what we’re providing at Tradier,” he said.
Raju revealed that they also plan to expand into Forex by replicating their unique network effect model into that segment. “We are taking a “wait and see” approach to crypto for the time being as we gain regulatory clarity on that asset class,” he commented.
