Welcome to Tradovate

Why did we do it?

When we announced we were launching another brokerage firm the first question we got from friends and industry participants was why? In an industry that has suffered from low interest rates and layered with never ending regulatory pressures, why would anyone want to enter such an industry. To us it was an easy decision. Firms were leaving the industry and the ones that were left were focused on surviving not creating or innovating. One only needs to look at the leader of back office systems for futures brokers to realize it is run on an AS400. Should we go on? The industry is stuck in legacy technology where M equals June and U equals September, not June equals June, because that is the way it was always done. There is so much room for improvement across the board, we could just not help to be drawn toward the opportunity to build a better user experience.

Not only did we see an opportunity to improve and innovate on technology, we studied the pricing model of futures brokers. I grew up as a futures broker. With my first company I was a one man brokerage firm so I understand what it means to collect a commission every time a client trades a contract. While that might have made sense when a human was touching every order and there was increased risk on each trade, that was 1996 and this is 2016. Today if a trader trades one contract or ten contracts there is minimal if any additional cost to the brokerage firm. So why do brokers continue to charge per contract? Because they can and because it generates lots of revenue. Let’s not sugar coat this. The more you trade the more brokerage firms make.  But things have changed and we now live in a membership economy with, Amazon Prime, Netflix, TIDAL and so many more. After careful consideration we made the determination that this could and should be the way the futures industry is priced.

So what is Tradovate? Tradovate is a cloud based futures trading platform where you can trade anywhere from any device (download, web, tablet, mobile) commission free for a simple flat monthly membership fee. It is that easy. We would encourage you to try it. We have 14 day free trial with live market data where you can trade in simulation.