The first dealing room worldwide for Self-Directed Traders is now operational in Erasmuskloof, Pretoria. It is the world`s largest non-professional trading floor and is furnished with 64 seats.
The set-up has been created under the auspices of Forex Trader SA, a local brokerage and distributor for US-based Global Forex Trading (GFT), a division of Global Futures and Forex, and has been created in conjunction with its local technology partner, NNET.
Self-Directed Traders (SDTs) can be trained by Forex Traders SA, and then subsequently rent a seat in a fully operational and professional trading desk "Hi-Tech" environment. There are already some 2000 SDTs based in SA, and the number is growing at a rate of nearly 400 per month. Currently most of the SDTs work from a "home" environment with limited but expensive facilities.
The trading-desk environment is furnished with NEC equipment linked into a very sophisticated network through to the GFT installation in Michigan, together with the usual incoming feeds such as that from Reuters. Each seat at each centre is equipped with two 17-inch screens linked to a PC, which in turn is linked into two servers. The trading room also has a 42-inch Plasma and a raft of TV screens for general use. The centre also has associated with it a fully qualified trading mentor and on-site technical support.
The centre is split into two sets each of 32 seats; one for currency trading and the other for such entities as derivatives, futures, commodities and options. The centre guarantees a four-second transaction time and a 300-millisecond response turnaround. For currency trading, Everest advanced charting software and DealBook advanced trading software from GFT are utilised by the traders and this is resident on both the remote hosts and the local client systems.
The network utilises high-speed data lines and satellite connections through to Washington DC and onwards via T1 lines to Michigan. In a similar way, the futures and options traders operate using the locally developed RepliTrader software from FuturesTraderOnline.
The current plan is for 40 such sites to be established within a two-year period, each of which will be either a 36- or 64-seat set-up; with the installations at Nelspruit and Witbank being the first two in the queue.
"This initiative is a very exciting one for us," commented Bert Deysel, an executive at NNet. The speed with which we have been able to become operational utilising such a complex network scenario has surprised all of us, but we are confident that this installation and the others planned for the future will be very successful and fully subscribed."
"The world is watching our activities in SA very closely, as we were told that `it was not possible` to implement what we have done, and we have now proved them wrong," commented Basil du Preez, MD of Forex Trader SA (Pty) Ltd.
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