Currensee

» see currensee.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Currensee started in 2008 in Boston as a social network for currency traders, built by Asaf Yigal and Avi Leventhal, with Dave Lemont brought in to run it the following year. The network opened publicly in October 2009 and was pleasant enough but not a business: people linked their live brokerage accounts, the site showed what everyone was actually doing with real money, and nobody paid for it. The business arrived in October 2010 as the Trade Leaders Investment Program, which turned the better traders on the network into something you could allocate money to.

It raised somewhere between fifteen and twenty million dollars depending on whose count you take, mostly from North Bridge Venture Partners with Egan-Managed Capital alongside. The numbers it published in June 2011 were the high-water mark of the whole story: twelve million dollars allocated through the program and six billion dollars of volume since launch, with four hundred-odd active investors in more than fifty countries averaging better than twenty-five thousand dollars an account. Fewer than two percent of the thousand-plus applicants to be a Trade Leader were accepted. In November 2012 the industry gave it a best-social-trading-platform award.

OANDA announced the acquisition on 24 September 2013 and completed it six days later, for a price nobody has ever disclosed. The program went live for OANDA's MetaTrader clients within about eight weeks and was fully integrated into OANDA's own platform by March 2014. Lemont's departure was confirmed on 2 April. On 9 October at half past twelve, OANDA posted a notice in its customer forum saying that Currensee and the Trade Leaders Program would cease operation on 31 October, after a strategic review in which customers had made clear that self-directed trading was their priority. Seven months of fully integrated operation, then three weeks of notice.

The nearest thing to this market in my own life is the one everybody in Turkey watches and nobody can do anything about, which is the lira against the dollar. Retail forex, as a category you choose to enter, was somebody else's hobby. What is worth reading about Currensee is the machinery it had to build to turn trusting a stranger with your position sizing into a product with terms attached.

~ the case file ~

~ how the mirror worked ~

A follower did not deposit money with Currensee. The company was registered with the CFTC as an introducing broker, so you opened an account at one of its partner brokers, and then allocated a dollar figure to each Trade Leader you wanted to follow. From then on that leader's trades appeared in your account automatically, with the size coming from their leverage applied to your allocation rather than from their lot size, and the leverage could differ per leader and per trade. Touch the positions yourself and the mirror broke, and the terms said so plainly.

Getting accepted as a leader meant linking your own live account and showing a real record through it: a year at ten percent or better, and six months of net positive performance tracked inside the system, reviewed daily against risk targets. These were people trading their own money in public, under their own record, paid out of other people's gains on it.

~ two and twenty, retail ~

The pricing was lifted out of the hedge fund world and it kept the part that protects the client. An investor paid two percent a year, billed monthly at 0.167 percent of average capital, plus twenty percent of net realized profits. Both were computed per Trade Leader, and each leader carried a high-water mark, so a leader who lost your money earned nothing further from you until your account was back above its previous high for the capital you had given them. The site's own worked example: leader A makes 200 dollars and leader B loses 100, you pay twenty percent on A and nothing on B.

Of the twenty points, fifteen went to the leader and five stayed with Currensee, on top of the service fee. The terms forbade the usual arrangement in this corner of the industry, which is the broker paying the signal provider per transaction: no Trade Leader was allowed to be compensated by any broker for offering their trades.

~ the notice ~

OANDA's stated reason was that its customers wanted self-directed trading. The trade press reporting the closure added that demand for the program had been scant, and noted that fxUnity, OANDA's earlier social trading attempt, had been closed not long before. Sixteen leaders and 3,737 investors were in the program when the notice went up, against the seven thousand members and eighty countries the network had claimed in 2010.

currensee.com now redirects to OANDA's trading site. The name survived in one odd place for years afterward: a currency correlation tool on OANDA's own servers kept the Currensee heading into 2019, four and a half years after the service it belonged to had been switched off.

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