Binary options broker Anyoption has come out with an interesting analysis of the growth in mobile trading in the binary options space. We are pleased to share it with LeapRate readers. Do you agree with their findings?
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Smartphone usage has been on the rise for a number of years now and has already overtaken desktop as the most popular device on which to search and to shop. But could mobile also become the most popular platform for binary traders? Figures suggest this may soon be the case, despite the finance industry being typically a late adopter of new technology.
The proportion of those using mobile as a device for binary trading has increased significantly in the past year. Back in November 2014, the vast proportion of trading on our site – the world’s largest binary options trading platform – was performed on desktop (98 percent). However, early in 2015, adoption of mobile trading on the website began to sharply increase, and reached a peak of 42 percent of total usage in June.
What caused this surge in January 2015?
One explanation is that users are beginning to multiscreen more often. Binary options trading is inherently a game of timings, hence why mobile lends itself well to flexible, on-the-go financial investing. Being able to trade anywhere and anytime means Call and Put options can be timed down to the tee, regardless of the device that is closest to hand.
Mobile banking has also seen a significant rise in 2015, which could explain more people using mobile for other financial matters. Today, all banks have some kind of mobile offering as they increasingly shift to a mobile first approach. As a result of this push, adoption of mobile banking services is currently at 38 percent across Europe and the UK (according to KPMG). As users become more familiar and trusting of mobile finance, binary trading on mobile may have also grown in tandem.
Adoption of mobile does appear to be part of a wider trend amongst binary options traders. According to data from Google, mobile searches for terms like “anyoption” and “binary options trading” have increased significantly in the last two years, as more people are now real-time trading on-the-go as a supplement to desktop trading.
The graph below shows the total web searches for binary options related terms over a two year period. Total searches have only increased marginally by around 8,000, from 136,000 to 142,560, whilst mobile searches have shot up by around 26,000. The majority of this growth occurred from January 2015.
Between October 2013 and 2015, mobile searches for binary options related terms almost tripled, from 13,000 to 36,000 – which is a relative increase of 9.7% to 26% of total searches across web and mobile. That’s more than a quarter of total mobile searches now being performed on mobile. Take a look at the percentage increase in mobile searches below.
This trend is not altogether unique to binary trading, though, and is likely due to that fact that mobile has seen a marked rise in popularity amongst consumers in general. According to Google, mobile’s share of global web search traffic leapt above desktop in May 2015, which goes to show just how accustomed people have become to mobile.
Interestingly, our options traders are right on the money with this mobile trend, as the number of mobile users grew significantly in May. They have also remained committed to using mobile ever since: from June 2015, an average one third of global users have been trading using either the mobile site or the anyoption app (even though we launched the app back in 2011).
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The original blog post appears on Anyoption’s website.