Admirals unveils its new proprietary trading platform

Faced with growing competition, brokers must evolve their services and offers. Estonia's Admirals, well known in the forex industry, has launched a proprietary trading platform, which complements its existing MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 offerings.

The Admirals trading platform
The MT4 and MT5 platforms, both developed by Metaquotes, are widely used for forex trading, but they can be a bit complex for beginners. Admirals is tackling this problem with its new proprietary platform.

"There's a whole new generation of traders coming into the market, and we wanted to give them a much simpler interface," says Daniel Skowronski, chief revenue officer at Admirals. "Generally, this platform is aimed more at new traders or those who are looking for a very easy to use platform in terms of simplicity."

To keep things simple, Admirals has developed the proprietary web-only trading platform. Users of the platform will have access to over 7,350 financial instruments, including stocks, ETFs, currency pairs and other CFDs on commodities and indices.

"We all know that the most professional traders account for most of the trading volume," Skowronski says. "But in terms of the number of active users, it is very likely that a lot of the profitability comes from beginners rather than intermediate traders."

Furthermore, he emphasises that a proprietary trading platform offers brokers much more flexibility.

Costs are high
However, developing a proprietary trading platform requires a lot of resources. A large, specialised technical team and reliable infrastructures are required. In addition, trading platforms are very demanding: they must be very responsive, with minimal latency, and guarantee close to 100% uptime.

Admirals revealed that development of the native trading platform began in early 2020 and moved to the testing phase in 2022. The platform and its features have been retested over the past year.

"It works as it is supposed to, without any bugs. There are no problems," the CRO adds. "It's in use all the time because we deal with people's money. When you launch something like that, you have to put it through a very rigorous testing process."

"There are also a lot of regulatory requirements that come with it. So we haven't done testing for our own users, but we have also tested the platform from a regulatory perspective."

In addition, the Estonian broker has had to strengthen its technical team over the years for the development of the trading platform. Currently, about 29% of Admirals' staff work in its technology division.

The cost associated with developing and maintaining a trading platform has only allowed the bigger brokers to offer their own trading platform. While some brokers only offer services with their own trading platform, others offer native platforms as well as MetaTrader options.

However, most smaller companies rely on third-party trading platforms such as MT4/MT5 and cTrader, among others, to offer their services. MT4 and MT5 are also popular among experienced traders. MT4 still represents around 45% of the market in Q2 2023, followed by MT5 with almost 34%.

Admirals' ambitions
Admirals was founded in 2000 by Alexander Tsikhilov, now president of the broker, and is one of the oldest brands in the industry. Previously, it was known as Admiral Markets, but the broker rebranded to Admirals. Although rebranding decisions are difficult to make, Admirals has done so with its future prospects in mind.

"For about 20 years we were just a forex and CFD brand. Today we want to change it," Skowronski says. "We don't know what the future will hold. Even though we had this whole 'Markets' brand, Admiral Markets didn't fit this new vision of what Admirals could be."

"We decided to drop the term "Markets" and keep the name Admirals so as not to lose the connection to the brand that we have built over time. But we felt it was necessary to evolve the brand."