The subject of how to acquire and retain clients is a well-conversed one in the retail FX business. The cost of gaining new clients is significantly higher than it was just three years ago, and traditional methods of retention are no longer effective, especially subsequent to many brokers adopting the agency model.
As a result, there has been a move toward engaging existing clients by providing systems which can assist in ensuring that traders remain loyal to a particular broker, one of which is the use of portfolio management, and as such, many FX firms have entered strategic partnerships with portfolio managers as well as provide PAMM facilities as part of their main platform offering.
One such company to recently embrace this is SGT Markets, which has entered into an exclusive agreement with Managed Forex Authority in which it intends to bring institutional managers to retail clients. Matthew Atherton, a senior executive at SGT Markets who presides over the firm’s institutional division recently explained to LeapRate “We have entered into an exclusive relationship with Managed Forex Authority. This is a site specifically geared toward managed products for the retail trader. That is finally running full tilt and will offer several managed products and will add to that once properly tested and vetted. It will be something people will start hearing more and more about as word of mouth travels.”
LeapRate spoke today with Managed Forex Authority CEO Eward Haugh in order to ascertain its rationale.
“I’ve decided to go exclusive with SGT Markets since I like the service he provides to us. I never have to worry about anything not getting done or clients not being taken care of etc. Everything I have ever needed or told Matthew he has always taken care of and has been a pleasure to deal with so far” he explained.
“By going exclusive with SGT they’ve labeled my company Managed Forex Authority (MFA) as the go to source for managed products. I am taking a different approach than that of our competition. The quality that MFA is bringing to the “Retail Investor” is in my opinion something new, and the result of my 17 years worth of trading experience, of which 8 years has been in FX.”
“The issue I see out there is there are no SOLID opportunities for the retail investor on the internet. I mean everything we see these days that is offered to the retail investor, I am sure people have good intentions but you know as well as I do that 99% of it loses money. Whether its EAs or signals or alerts or Other Managed Trading Ventures. I simply want to give the everyday investor / trader a REAL opportunity to reach their financial goals.”
“To do this I need REAL products that will actually make consistent profit for our clients and capable of scaling up to a significant amount (100’s of million) for each product. So I chose to go strictly with systems that are used in institutional trading desks and forget about Retail Systems / Traders altogether.”
Mr. Haugh concurs that this has not been an easy task. “However I now have brought MFA users access to 30 institutional managers or so with well over 100 institutional systems between them all. These systems all come with long, proven, low risk track records and generally are private systems or come with minimums from 50k to several million. The average minimum to participate in each individual system is approximately 1 million dollars” he concluded.