It’s become commonplace: more of our everyday business and personal experiences are happening on mobile devices. From e-mail correspondence, to conducting business tasks or keeping abreast of current events – we now have the power to use our “free” time (queuing for morning coffee, traveling, waiting for a meeting to begin) to take care of things while on the go.

Currency trading is yet another activity on the cusp of moving from the desktop to the handset and it’s a revolutionary change. Judging from the mobile trading behavior of OANDA’s clients, traders want a robust platform at their fingertips. They want to be able to do more than merely check on their positions or to take a peek at the latest currency pair spreads, they want the full desktop trading experience on a mobile device.

While we’ll continue to provide and enhance the OANDA platform for the desktop, our future efforts will have mobile top-of-mind. This is where the world is increasingly heading, and according to Morgan Stanley Research, mobile users will exceed desktop users by 2014.

The future of retail forex trading is mobile

We were among the first to build native applications for the most popular mobile platforms (iOS and Android) because more of our clients use these devices and native apps offer a great trading experience. Features like sophisticated charting, technical analysis tools, and real-time streaming prices, positions, and news feeds are available within our native apps, each tailored for a specific operating system. But we also have a mobile website (m.oanda.com) for BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and users of other leading devices to access our online trading platform.

Providing a seamless trading experience from desktop to mobile is about more than developing native mobile apps. It requires thinking about how your customers move between trading platforms throughout the day. It also requires mobile-first design principles that encompass responsive user interface design to ensure the trading experience can adjust to any screen size and present an effective layout for any type of computer.

OANDA has made a major commitment to mobile development because we see mobile trading becoming as common as browsing the web or reading e-mail on your handset. With the significant enhancements made to the OANDA mobile applications recently, investors who like to trade forex while on the go have many benefits to take advantage of.

For example, through the use of mobile app alerts and push notifications, even when I may not be viewing my phone's screen or the OANDA platform on my desktop, having the ability to set-up key activities to monitor the markets and my portfolio provides confidence that I'll be notified at a moment’s notice when my attention is required. The ability to react immediately to changing market conditions is a big benefit for forex traders, particularly for those of us that fall into that part-time or day trader demographic.

Mobile trading behavior

OANDA’s clients have largely embraced mobile trading. In the past 12 – 18 months we’ve seen a growing number of customers download and use OANDA’s native mobile apps, regardless of platform.

Their behavior is interesting. Some customers sign in to the OANDA platform on a desktop first, get into their positions, and then switch to mobile devices to monitor things throughout the day. When they do, they’re checking to see where their trading positions are at, to see where their stop-loss and take-profit triggers are at, and to get out of a position quickly if the market direction turns against them. Others are using mobile apps exclusively to trade, foregoing the desktop altogether. This is a trend that is on the rise and it’s one we anticipate will continue.

To what degree does mobile computing factor into your daily trading routines? Do you still primarily access the OANDA platform from a desktop? Please share your thoughts in the comments box below.