US online trading giant Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:IBKR) has been on a roll this spring in terms of beefing up its services. The spring mood has reached one of the broker’s most interesting projects: Investors’ Marketplace, which has grown out of its beta age and is now totally redesigned and working at full throttle.
Investors’ Marketplace is the venue to offer various products and services to a wide variety of participants in the online trading industry. As the broker puts it, this is “the marketplace where individual and institutional investors interact with trading service providers to form connections and conduct business”.
The microsite dedicated to Investors’ Marketplace is easy to navigate and provides a menu of services, ranging from research and trading software to auditing. The network welcomes individual traders along with brokers and hedge funds, money managers, legal firms, advertisers, software developers, compliance firms – all participants that form the online trading realm. As any marketplace, this one enables purchasing and marketing (offering one’s services).
It is this variety of users that (at least partially) explains the fact that Interactive Brokers abandoned the previous name of the project – Traders’ Marketplace. Another reason is probably the desire to distinguish the offer from existing marketplaces for FX traders – we can mention OANDA Marketplace, the FXCM Apps store and TradeStation’s TradingApp Store.
Of course, only future will tell whether Interactive Brokers’ project will make a splash, especially in an environment crowded with such marketplaces. It is the participation of institutional investors that will probably play the decisive role in this respect. It will be interesting to see whether Interactive Brokers will dare to add a social aspect to this network, enabling participants to interact beyond the the formal economic level. The latter, however, is mere speculation.
To learn more about Investors’ Marketplace, click here.
