By Zachary Storella, CountingPips.com

Today, I am very pleased to bring you a new forex interview with James Glade, the Business Development Manager for Spotware Systems Limited, a neutral financial technology provider. Spotware‘s flagship product is the cTrader trading platform that is popular among traders in the forex markets. In our last cTrader interview, the platform was relatively new but stood out with its design quality, stunning visual graphics and focus on improving the user experience. Since then, cTrader has implemented numerous new features and tools for its traders.

James has agreed to update us on a lot of the recent changes and the many new features that have been added to cTrader in the past few years. Questions are in bold.

For people who have never heard of Spotware or cTrader, Can you briefly explain the history of Spotware and tell our readers what cTrader is?

James Glade: Spotware Systems is a financial technology company, while we have a number of products and services our most well-known product is the cTrader Suite which we released over 6 years ago. We work closely with many of the largest brokers, prime brokers and top tier liquidity providers to deliver powerful solutions for all corners of the financial services industry.

Who are the ideal candidates to use cTrader?

To be honest, cTrader will fit the criteria of any trader. Because of the rich functionality available any strategy can be applied. To elaborate, experienced traders will immediately appreciate the execution quality, since cTrader uses the most current technologies available and connects to FIX API feeds from any Liquidity Provider natively. New traders will enjoy the modern and intuitive user interface, even our most advanced order types are not only easy to find but easy to use, complicated doesn’t necessarily mean better and a simplistic design removes unnecessary steps when quick reactions are needed.

At present, what parts of the world can trade using cTrader? Can USA based traders trade through the platform? (If not, do you see that changing in the future?)

Presently, USA is one of the places where no cTrader broker is regulated. Due to a number of factors which surround the entire nature of the US retail investment marketplace it makes it far more difficult for brokers to adopt cTrader, even though our platform meets all necessary local regulatory requirements. We are hoping this will change in the future, especially with the new presidential candidates, one of whom has a keen interest in bringing business back to the United States.

There seems to be a lot of updates and improvements all the time in the cTrader platform including recent features like Live Sentiment on the charts and chart integration with Trading Central trading ideas. There is a voting system that you guys have implemented to get feedback and ideas on how to improve the service. Do you feel this has helped the progress of cTrader move more rapidly?

Absolutely! The voting system is essential to our development. It has sparked some great ideas and helps us to gauge priorities too. We also get feedback from inside each our trading platforms and directly to our feedback inbox. We get hundreds of new ideas every day, all of the product managers and senior management read every single one, every single day. We also reply to each email to help users with their questions and elaborate on their ideas.

Can you tell us some of the best ideas that have been implemented from the user voting system?

We have had some great ideas and usually it’s the smallest ones which have the most effect, I mean the small tweaks which have a dramatic impact on user experience. Most recently we have added the option to remove a couple of overlay buttons on the chart, even though they were here for convenience, since allowing a trader to detach the chart into a new window, many users found it distracting. This is what I mean by small, but still very significant.

An interesting option on cTrader is the Cloud Accounts feature. Can you explain what this does and how a trader might benefit by using the cloud account feature?

cTrader ID is great feature. It is not a trading account but a user account. A trader can have several trading accounts across different brokers and login using their cTrader ID credentials instead of having to remember several sets of credentials, plus they can link to their Facebook or Google account for even more convenience. Once you have a cTrader ID you can save all of your preferences here to use on another brokers cTrader and even another PC.

When I last interviewed someone from cTrader in 2011, custom indicators were not yet available on the platform! Now there are custom indicators, cBots, cMirror and cAlgo. Can you briefly explain what cBots are, what cAlgo is, what cMirror is and how traders use them in their activities?

cAlgo is our one-stop-shop algorithmic trading solution. In cAlgo you will find our c# API library, a built in code editor with autocomplete and the ability to backtest, optimize, compile and finally run your robot or use your custom indicator. cAlgo boasts a whole suite of tools to help you write your code efficiently and effectively. You can also add your robot or custom indicator into cTrader if you prefer to trade from that environment.

cMirror in a nutshell, is a mirror trading platform which has a very professional feel to it. It’s not social, it just focuses on trading and investing. Anyone can become a strategy provider and broadcast all of their trades from their cTrader account which populates their strategy profile. Strategy providers can set exactly how much to charge as a commission to their followers which is paid to follow every trade. Investors have a huge range of strategies to choose from since cMirror allows them to follow strategies from any cTrader broker. Investors can start following with just a few clicks. There is a range of risk management tools available to them.

I would recommend any trader to look at both of these products.

Where are the best places for traders to find more resources if they would like to try out cBots, cAlgo, cMirror or custom indicators or build their own? Is there a marketplace currently to buy or sell these tools?

We provide the cTrader developer network (http://ctdn.com/) which is the perfect venue for anyone interested in learning more or getting started with cAlgo, cTrader or cMirror. Here traders can exchange cBots and custom indicators, discuss a variety of topics in the forum, post development jobs, as well as find approved VPS providers and consultants. We also have a detailed help portal which is available at help.spotware.com (http://help.spotware.com/)

There are also Android and IOS versions of the cTrader platform for those inclined to trade on mobile devices. At present time, do more traders still use the desktop/web platforms compared to the mobile versions?

We are seeing a lot of activity from the mobile apps and we can see they are being used in a variety of ways. Most users have the app. Some of which are trading solely from their mobile or tablet while others are using them to check their profile, modify or close positions while on the go or just keep up to date on price movements. The cTrader mobile apps include just over 70 indicators which can be fully customized, plus they are incredibly responsive so applying lines or objects is easier than you would expect on a mobile device, this is what has led to the mobile app being adopted as the primary platform for many users.  

What differences are there between the mobile versions and the desktop/web versions?

In terms of execution and performance there is no difference whatsoever. In terms of functionality there are a few very, very minor differences and this is purely down to development times as they are different products and managed by different teams, so we’re talking very small differences. It’s no longer a case of which platform has which features it is a case of what device you prefer trading from.  

Q: Since there has been so much change and progress in the last 4-5 years for cTrader, can you tell us where the next phase of innovation might be? What do you think is on the horizon for cTrader?

Over the past months we have been focusing on supporting new asset classes in cTrader which we have done an amazing job at. Unlike other leading platforms cTrader can and is supporting almost one thousand markets, which can be seen in the Spotware demos available from our website (http://www.spotware.com/). Traders can access Equities, Indices and ETFs from across the world and the number of brokers also supporting these markets is growing week by week. cTrader is no longer a Forex only trading platform, it has evolved, it will keep evolving and it’s very exciting.

Is there any aspect of cTrader and its effect on the trading experience that we might have missed you would like to talk about?

I think it is really important to stress that cTrader provides a guaranteed non dealing desk environment for traders and everything we do is ultimately in the interest of traders. As an example we developed our very own signature fair stop out functionality which works in favor of the trader by closing position based on margin used in order to free margin and protect the other positions, as opposed to other methods used which simply close losing positions which doesn’t do anything to help the traders free margin.

For interested traders looking to try out the cTrader platform on a demo account or live account basis, where would you recommend they go to start?

Anyone can download any of our platforms from the Spotware website and create a free unlimited lifetime demo without having to register. You can later find one of our brokers and again create a demo account with them to experience their trading conditions. We have a list of featured brokers (http://www.spotware.com/partners/featured-brokers) on our website. These brokers have been offering cTraders for many years and we are comfortable that they will provide the service that traders expect.  

Thank you James for taking the time to share your thoughts and information in our latest forex interview. To find out more about cTrader and to try out the platform, visit ctrader at spotware.com.