With the launch of OANDA’s new Forex Lab Notes blog comes the opportunity to share the expertise and knowledge within OANDA’s Research and Analytics (ORA) team.

We want to help improve our customers’ knowledge of the forex market by empowering them with the tools and education they need to make more informed trading decisions. We see this as a potential benefit to them and, by extension, to OANDA as well.

OANDA has an outstanding track record of innovation: we were the first to offer free exchange rate data on the web and to provide fully automated online forex trading. But we’re not about to rest on our laurels. We are continuously striving to improve our core systems and add value to our products. We believe these efforts will benefit our customers, to whom we wish to forge long-term relationships.

Introducing OANDA Research and Analytics

Enter the ORA group, which brings together OANDA’s scientific R&D side of the business and our engineering architecture teams. The main focus of ORA is to develop new technologies as we progress with our product roadmap.

The quantitative analysis branch of the ORA group spends its days developing the models and the means of analyzing data and transactions. They’re very much involved in the nitty-gritty math of how we understand the forex market, our customers, and how we can use that knowledge to make a better product.

The OANDA MarketPulseFX blog led by Dean Popplewell provides commentary for traders to better understand the forex market. But educating our clients about forex trading means doing more than just telling them about global economies and politics, which is why the OANDA Forex Lab Notes blog will become the technical analog to Dean’s group.

I see these two blogs as complementary in our mission to educate and support traders. Ultimately our goal is straightforward: help make traders better educated in the retail forex space and arm them with the knowledge that they need to ensure they’re being treated fairly by their broker of choice.

Caveat emptor and forex trading

When I look at what’s driving the competitive landscape in the retail forex space, much of the chatter seems to be focused solely on spreads. Spreads are clearly a major driver, but that perspective is evolving as people become savvy about the quality of execution, the safety of funds, the diversity of product, and platform features that various brokers bring to the table.

Ten years ago, the marketing and customer education in personal computing almost exclusively focused on “gigahertz” as the sole measure of your PC’s worth, with every advertisement extoling the clock speed, and speaking nothing of reliability or features. Apple has done a great job of educating consumers by pulling hardware specs out of the equation, and putting the focus on product features and tangible benefits. (You don’t hear people bragging about their new 1.9 GHz iPad!) OANDA is committed to tight spreads. But we hope to educate you more on what to do with those prices, because low spreads are meaningless without quality of execution and transparent pricing that enables you to verify the price fills of your orders.

OANDA is a company founded on innovation. We pride ourselves on our engineering excellence, price transparency, and a commitment to customer satisfaction. Keep an eye on this space as we share the insights from the ORA group that not only showcases OANDA’s technical prowess, but more importantly, helps you make more informed trading decisions.

What other tools or improvements to the OANDA platform would you like to see? Please share your thoughts in the comments box below.