Automated forex trading has increased trade volumes

The concept of automated forex trading is fast catching on. The first market to move to automated trading was exchange-traded futures. Following this, traders working in the Interbank spot FX market too moved on to this system.

The success of the system flows from its ability conduct trade in real time. This is difficult to achieve manually, especially if the trading is to be done in milliseconds. Also, there may be times when a trader may be away from the desk, or a trader who has incurred a series of losses may take time before placing a fresh order. These are dampers that automated foreign trading removes.

Another advantage that automated trading brings in is diversification. It is possible for a trader to trade in different markets, and in different time zones. The trader can also deploy multiple trading models.

The trader can also use the automated model to analyze short-term data, which is not possible otherwise. This gives the trader an advantage over others who are not using the automated trading system. The trader can use this short-term data to analyze how the market will move in the next 15 minutes or half an hour, and accordingly take decisions. Also, high frequency trading allows existing data to be used in different ways in different markets.

Automated trading also improves liquidity. This is quite apparent from the way the number of trades shot up in futures exchanges following the adoption of automated trading.

However, one area that worries traders is the likely increase in the number of orders once all traders adopt this system. The fear is that there may not be sufficient bandwidth or engine capacity to execute all these orders in real time. Already, some quarters are employing controls to guard against unnecessary order messages.

Risk management is another area that worries forex traders. An automated trading environment's risk management logic requires that before a new position is opened a check be made to ensure that there is no excessive correlation with already opened positions. For this check to be accurate, all systems need to be synchronised. But these are technical issues that the market feels will be resolved as the technology improves.

For the time being automated trading in forex is the buzzword.

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