What Features Futures Traders Want

A major benefit of futures trading is the large variety of offerings. Futures markets are represented by many types of investors, traders, hedgers and other market participants.

Because futures traders are exposed to a diverse range of information, the tools and data they have available to them is very important. There are a lot of tools already available, so what do they want to see more of? To find out, we conducted a Futures Market Survey: What Drives Futures Market Participants, which was compiled from the results of over 400 respondents. The responses came from four unique audiences: a General Online Audience, surveyed on Facebook; a Business Professional Audience, surveyed on LinkedIn; an Active Investor Audience, surveyed on Barchart.com; and a Listed Derivatives Audience, surveyed through the John Lothian Newsletter.

In conducting this survey, we found out that the top tools that futures market participants want to see more of, starting with the most to least wanted, include Free Data, Faster Data, Better Charting, Trading Signals, Commodity Market News, Market Alerts, Trading Education, Algo Building Tools, Lower Commissions, Streaming Data in Excel, Online Trading Rooms, Data APIs, and Social Features.

We know how important these features are, so at Barchart, we are dedicated to improving and expanding on these features. On our financial portal Barchart.com, we offer a free membership with limited access to data and tools such as futures market quotes, charts, and commentary. , and a premier membership with full access. We also offer a free market data api that supplies users with futures quotes.

Our data is not only reliable, but also fast, Barchart Stream simplifies your workflows by consolidating global exchange data and offers a cost-saving approach to accessing low-latency market data in original exchange format. Our proprietary technology consolidates and compresses your data while maintaining the speed, accuracy and reliability of tick-for-tick raw exchange feeds making it easy to provide your users with fast and reliable futures data.

Our interactive charts are an extremely popular tool on barchart.com. You can add interactive charts to your own website with our Interactive Charting Solution. Available through our HTML5 Charting Library and Interactive Charting Widgets, we make it easy to provide your users with the advanced charting they want.

Traders need access to up-to-date market news and information. Give futures traders what they need to make critical decisions by integrating commodity market news into your customer-facing application. Our Commoditiy Newswires delivers actionable news, market analysis, and proprietary data sets with simple integration.

Sometimes you can’t do everything you need to in software or a financial portal, this is why we created cmdtyView Excel, which was designed for deep analysis and research that can help users automate and improve their workflows and takes research and analysis to the next level. We even created Excel templates that allow users to create stunning visualizations that leverage all of the data in our market data ecosystem. One of our extremely popular templates, the Futures Market Dashboard template, was designed just for our users to be able to keep an eye on the futures markets as simply as possible.

Our data-driven Alerting Service provides firms with the ability to easily integrate event-based alerts using any data that is available within Barchart’s data ecosystem into their websites, software, mobile apps and internal systems.

To use and explore Barchart’s tools and features made available for futures traders and investors for yourself, including both free and premium services, please visit www.barchart.com. To download the futures market survey, please click here.