Cyprus based company turns focus to retail traders

Quant Insight (Qi), a Limassol-based quantitative financial market analytics and trading insights provider, on Wednesday announced the launch of a new product, aiming to provide individual traders with high-end analytics.

Called iQbyQi, the new tool seeks to enable retail traders, meaning individuals who buy or sell securities using their personal accounts, to access advanced data, reports and insights previously only available to institutional traders, such as asset managers and hedge funds.

“Key information moves markets, but it’s all connected and overwhelming and it is impossible for the human brain to parallel process all this data and information,” Quant Insight co-founder and CEO Mahmood Noorani said.

“Institutional investors have always had access to cutting edge technology, tools and resources such as Qi, however, the trend towards democratisation is accelerating and the launch of iQbyQi designed for individual traders is another key marker on that path,” he added.

Noorani explained that the new analytics tool levels the playing field by offering retail traders advanced insight, backed by machine learning technology, artificial intelligence and data science.

According to Quant Insight, the iQbyQi tool utilises a cloud-based AI system that takes into account millions of data points in real-time, while having the ability to contextualise those data points in terms of how they relate to the market.

Through this technology, the new product can bring opportunities and risks to the attention of the trader, while offering them bespoke insights and analytics.

The company said that the product, which will be initially available to traders in Europe and the Middle East, is being launched in Limassol because it is a world-renowned forex hub for retail traders.

“This is a far cry from the myriad of subjective, conflicting, and often confusing opinions and comments that flood retail investors every minute,” Noorani said.

The importance of retail traders has grown larger over the past few years, a process that was accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.

A survey by financial services firm Charles Schwab, which have 31.5 million retail clients and $6.9 trillion in assets, found that roughly 15 per cent of current retail traders first entered the market in 2020, earning the moniker ‘Generation Investor’.

Furthermore, the so-called meme stock craze in January coincided with 7.8 million new retail traders entering the market during the first two months of 2021, according to investment bank JMP Securities.

JMP Securities also reported that, based on its estimates, 10 million new traders entered the market in 2020, with 6 million of them registering with Robinhood, a financial technology company heavily involved in the aforementioned meme stock phenomenon.

The Charles Schwab survey mentioned earlier, also found that new retail traders are not necessarily young people, but have a median age of 35 years old, drawing a correlation between how impacted this age group has been from the pandemic and their newfound desire to play the market.

Despite the increased interest in retail trading, reports suggest that between 60 and 80 per cent of individual traders lose money.

Regulatory bodies have highlighted this fact and are urging current and future investors to be better educated about the market in order to make more informed investment decisions.

“For too long the investment world has relied on a mixture of subjective research, educated guesses and an abundance of data that has made accurate decision-making impossible,” Quant Insight Europe CEO Zahi Younan said.

Younan leads the company’s headquarters in Limassol, which opened in October of 2021.

“iQbyQi is the antidote to a world where retail traders are swamped by countless subjective opinions leading to nothing but confusion; an antidote based on the power of data science, Ai and machine learning for better investment decisions,” Younan added.