Movember

Particularly in 2020, Mental Health and Men’s Health has become a big issue world wide. I’ve decided to grow a Mo during the month of November to help increase awareness of Men’s Health Issues and raise funds for all the great organisations supported by the Movember movement.

Please click the link below to sponsor me.

Thanks, Dave

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2019 Year in Review

2019 was a year of fulfilling dreams from ticking a box on my personal bucket list to building out our global team and adding game changing features to the Tapaas Platform.

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Enhanced Risk Management with Trader Profiling and Account Labels

Do you remember the first time you used a hashtag?  Probably not. But I bet you probably didn’t appreciate its significance at the time or envisage what a powerful tool it would become.  Now, imagine the power of a hashtag, as output from our Trader Profiling Analytics and how it will enhance your risk management.  We call this new feature Account Labelling. 

That’s the beauty of innovation – once the tools are in the hands of the customer they take on a life of their own.  Humans are compelled to innovate. Since cavemen discovered fire, we have been coming up with creative and useful ways to use it.

Innovation comes from asking the crucial question – “I wonder if there’s a better way?”

That’s been our experience with the brokers and dealers who use Tapaas. It was because one of our clients asked: “Does Tapaas have a way to put accounts on a watchlist?” that our team came up with a solution that has exceeded all expectations.

Tapaas developed a watchlist which has evolved into an incredibly powerful feature we call Account Labelling.  Not only can you attach it to a trading account for Watchlist, but you can also use it with multiple labels to flag any aspect of trading behaviour on various accounts.

Now, imagine the power of a hashtag, as output from our Trader Profiling Analytics and how it will enhance your risk management. We call this new feature Account Labelling. Click To Tweet

Just like the hashtag, it was not obvious at first how useful this feature would become until we decided to use the Label tool to enhance our Risk Alerts and Analytics Engines. We applied labels to accounts based on the results from our Alert and Analytic algorithms.

Trader Profiling Analytics Now Apply Labels to Accounts

So, with several Alerts and Analytics enabled to apply Labels, in addition to receiving an Alert when an account is identified as Toxic, a Label is applied.  Now, when viewing the portfolio of trading accounts, you can also see which accounts were Labelled as Toxic. There are many new Labels, including:

  • Front Runner – regularly wins in first 2 seconds after execution;
  • Movement Trader – trades primarily during price volatility ;
  • LP Toxic – nearly always profits during 30 seconds after execution; and
  • News Trader – trades mostly around news announcements like NFP

While analysing the accounts performance metrics, such as win/loss ratio, profitability, risk and leverage, you can also see these Trading Behaviour Labels and incorporate these features into your risk and execution policies.

account-label

The Account Label Management system features three types of Labels:

  • System Assigned Labels – these are assigned by our algorithms;
  • eXclude System Assigned Labels – these are applied by dealers to override the algorithm’s results.  (At the end of the day humans always trump AI.)
  • User Assigned Labels –  this was the original group of labels (expand)

This new trader monitoring tool is a step up from your usual risk management process. Account Label Manager is an efficient way to monitor accounts with similar characteristics, allowing for faster responses and more informed decisions.

Most importantly, you can adjust the tool to suit your individual needs, even within the same trading desk. By applying appropriate filtering you can choose which ‘lists’ to monitor and what labels each dealer needs to create and assign.

This new feature complements Tapaas’ other client profiling tools, such as Cohort dashboard, News traders analytics, Trading Volume Burst and Syndicate Trading.

So, thank you to the broker who asked: is there a better way to label accounts? The answer is yes, with Tapaas’ Account Label Management system.

If you’d like to learn more about the Tapaas Platform and Trader Profiling contact us for a demo and take the first step in super-charging your risk management operations.  

Introducing Our Newest Team Member

Tapaas is growing so we are hiring!

Anyone who has a business knows how hard it is to find good people with the right skills and experience.   We have been recruiting Operations and Support Specialists to build our team in Cyprus since late last year.  We are happy to announce that we have found our guy!

We would like to welcome and introduce Cagan Cerkez, Operations and Support Specialist. Cagan will be handling customer support and assisting our Customer Success Manager, Andria Orphanidou, with operations.

Cagan-Ops-SupportCagan was the Technical Support Team Manager at Thomson Reuters for three years. His nine years in customer service in the finance and risk industry is sure to enhance our clients’ experience with Tapaas. We know our customers will be in good hands.

He is ready to take on any customer challenges that come with a fast and dynamic market, and to expand his knowledge on cutting edge technology trends like big data analytics and cloud computing.

 

A Short Bio from Cagan

I have been managing the technical support desk of Thomson Reuters’ Finance and Risk division in Cyprus for the past three years.  I have mainly provided support for Thomson Reuters Eikon, FX Trading, Deal Tracker and Thomson Reuters Trade Notification applications in the MENA region. Prior to becoming the team manager, I was a technical specialist in the same team.  I’ve had over nine years’ of customer support experience in the finance and risk industry.

I joined Tapaas because it’s an agile company founded by experienced people I can learn from. Tapaas is using cutting edge technology like big data analytics, machine learning and cloud computing to solve real customer problems in a very fast and dynamic market.  

 

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ASIC Calls for Improved Risk Practices by Retail OTC Derivatives Brokers

Risk Management

Retail OTC Derivatives Risk Management

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) recently conducted a review of 57 retail derivative issuers to gauge the size of the industry, the products offered and the risks posed to investors.  As a result of the study, they published a report titled REP 579: Improving practices in the retail OTC derivatives sector. The report provides an overview of the market and highlights several practices of Retail Brokers or issuers, in which they want to see improvement.

In this report, the commission warns OTC derivatives issuers about:

  • misleading marketing materials;
  • unclear pricing methods;
  • inadequate risk management;
  • inadequate monitoring of counter-parties; and
  • inappropriate referral arrangements.

ASIC promises to continue to take action to address these risks by raising industry standards and improving issuer’s compliance. This affects every ASIC regulated broker.

Inadequate Risk Practices

The ASIC report did not list all the risk practices deemed inadequate.  But, in the electronic trading environment of an OTC Derivatives Broker where prices are volatile and large volumes are traded in fractions of a second, any solution involving copy and paste to Excel is surely inadequate.  This is particularly true as a broker attempts to scale their business adding additional trading platform servers.

How can Tapaas Help?

Tapaas is a real-time Risk Management and Data Analytics platform which is integrated directly with the brokers trading platform.  As such, it continuously computes risk and presents it visually so it can be rapidly understood by the broker’s risk team.  Further, our Risk Alerts Engine monitors trading activity, risk and exposure continually evaluating broker policy settings and raising alerts in event of breach.

The solution achieves the following:

  • facilitates rapid understanding of the composition of risk in the context of policy;
  • alerts appropriate individuals to any breaches or situations which require immediate evaluation and action; and
  • provides a facility where Dealers and Risk Managers can take immediate remedial action like hedging and book switching.

Why Tapaas Risk Management Solution?

We’ve designed Tapaas specifically for Retail OTC Derivatives Brokers to address the challenge of managing risk in a the high velocity world of electronic trading.  It easily handles very large volumes of data and rapid price changes that cause large changes in exposure in an instant.  The Tapaas dashboards present data intuitively for rapid understanding.  They also allow the user to explore the data to discover facts which are not obvious from simply viewing static tables of data.

To learn more about how Tapaas can assist you with your risk management strategies.