The forex market is constantly evolving. Dennis De Jong from UFXMarkets, one of the world’s leading online forex brokers and investment networks, talks about Bitcoin and other advancements in forex technology

Forex Report: Well Dennis, let’s start with the fundamental steps to successful trading on the forex market, what would you say they are?

Dennis De Jong: If you are a trader, what you are looking for is liquidity, so you want to make sure that the broker you’re working with offers you liquidity. And also reliability, because if you are trading and you want to execute a new trade, you need to get in and out fast of positions, you want to execute a low cost, to be able to also take opportunities which arise in the market just coming and going.

Forex Report: As one of the leading forex brokers, what makes UFX stand out?

Our platform is very easy to operate, it allows even novice traders to see exactly where their investments are standing

Dennis De Jong: We get information from our traders that what they really appreciate in our service is that we are partners. We are operating a pure STP brokerage model, our clients understand that our interests align with their interests, and they appreciate this. This reflects with our clients [in] that we have had some of them for many years, and we don’t really call them traders or clients anymore, they’ve actually become part of the UFXMarkets family, and what this results into is that we have a very open and trustworthy communication channel with these clients, and whatever they suggest or whatever feedback we receive from those clients, it’s very important for us. And over the years we have listened to these suggestions, and we’ve started to implement them, and I would say that if we wouldn’t have done that, we wouldn’t be in the position we are in at the moment.

Also, transparency is an important issue for us. Our platform is very easy to operate, it allows even novice traders to see exactly where their investments are standing, what is going on with their money, and we have a very open way of communicating with our clients. Any question that is asked to our customer service team, it is answered promptly and professionally. But perhaps the most important service we offer to clients is our trading academy. This is our 45 minute sessions we offer with veteran traders, these are offered free of charge to all account holders, from the smallest ones to the largest ones, and our account holders get trained in online trading, platform techniques and navigation throughout the platform. And if we have advanced traders, there are self-teaching seminars as well, which enable clients to focus on further advanced strategies like hedging or day-trading.

Forex Report: Well what do traders need to look out for, what challenges do they face nowadays, and how do they overcome these?

The most important challenge that traders face is your own ego, and if you can control your ego you can make money

Dennis De Jong: Let me tell you from experience of having been a hedge fund manager myself, the most important challenge that traders face is your own ego, and if you can control your ego you can make money. What we are here for is trying to offer you the best platform, which offers you a full suit of capabilities, which ranges from market analysis, technical analysis, to trading signals, so that you can concentrate, you can sit down, you can make your analysis, you can execute.

Forex Report: So how do advancements in technology affect the forex market, and how do you approach this?

Dennis De Jong: Development is always at the cornerstone of UFXMarkets, and we try to address this with an award winning platform that we have already, we have got low slippage, we have got low latency as well to the clients, and amongst the lowest spreads in the industry. However, to be at the forefront of the research and development, and to offer our clients the newest charting techniques, we always need to constantly evolve and invest into the system, which also means we need to listen to what our clients want, and in 2014 we will see lots of new developments coming online to the platform, and all of these are geared to helping our traders in what they really want to achieve, which is to make money.

Forex Report: You’re among the only forex trading platforms facilitating the investment in Bitcoin, alongside traditional national currencies of course. This is quite a bold choice, why did you decide to do this?

UFXMarkets has always been at the forefront of developing new assets which clients can trade

Dennis De Jong: UFXMarkets has always been at the forefront of developing new assets which clients can trade, and we currently offer about 30 currency pairs, and roughly 80 assets in total, ranging from indices, forex pairs, to stocks and commodities. So the challenge was really to try and find a technology to implement it, but at the end of the day this benefits the client because we have to pull all of those strings together from our top-tier banks, from our liquidity providers, and from other service providers. Bitcoins itself, they have been in word of mouth, and have been in the press a lot. It’s interesting, and actually the reason we implemented it is because our traders have approached us and have asked us, this is an interesting new asset class, this is an interesting new instrument we would like to trade, so we have done our job and we have offered it to our clients.

Forex Report: Does Bitcoin make a good trading asset?

Dennis De Jong: I always like to introduce those kind of questions with a quote from a famous Wall Street investor from the 1940s, who said “if you are in a beauty contest, it doesn’t matter who you think will be the most beautiful girl, it matters most who everybody else thinks will be the most beautiful.” And likewise, if you are a trader, in reality it doesn’t matter what you are trading, what matters is there is liquidity, there is volatility, that you’ve got information which you can form an opinion on, and most important that there are also other traders who like to trade the same instrument, because this will give you a market and this let you execute new trades.

Forex Report: Well finally, what opportunities then do you see in the market for the year ahead?

Dennis De Jong: 2014 will definitely be a very interesting year. We see a lot of shifts, macroeconomic wise, policy wise. We’ve seen some very good date coming out of the US and also Europe, to a lesser extent. China’s growth is stabilising about the high seven percent mark, which is not really a surprise because the government is trying to shift it from more of an industrialised and export led economy, to a model which encourages more of a consumption service economy.

However, there are also emerging countries which have performed very well over the last year, and have been called recently the fragile five because their currencies have depreciated a lot, whereas the USD, and specifically you can see this with countries like Turkey and South Africa who greatly depend on foreign sources of investment. So I think, to round it up, the year 2014 will be full of interesting opportunities, and we are here to help our clients materialise in those opportunities.

Forex Report: Dennis, thank you.

Dennis De Jong: Thank you very much