TechFinancials Binary Options Trading Platform Review

TechFinancials Binary Options Platform Review

TechFinancials (previously known as OptionFair) offers a Binary Options trading platform which uses instruments such as Low-High, Touch/No Touch and In/Out Boundary.  With offices based in a variety of locations globally, Techfinancials seeks to provide both new and experienced traders with a user friendly trading interface that operates in a safe and efficient trading environment, and my test experience with them showed that they live up to most of the expectations they have established for themselves.  OptionFair offers a variety of unique features that can be tailored to your individual trading plan, such as their Buy Back Option, which allows traders to implement a stop loss in each position before the option contract reaches expiry.

Platform Ratings

Platform functionality (8/10) mostly based on the lack or technical analysis that can be done

Platform efficiency (9/10)

Ease of use (10/10)

Additional information (8/10)

Average number of assets and expiry times – 60 sec, 2 min, 5 min, hourly, daily, weekly (8.5/10)

Trading tools available – rollover, double up (8.5/10)

Trading options available – high/low, boundary, One Touch (7.5/10)

Prices & Rates: Accurate

Why TechFinancials doesn’t suck?

The user interface is very well designed, very straight forward and efficient. All of my trades were executed when I placed my orders and I had no issues with re-quotes or slippage.  Overall, I found TechFinancials to be a very reliable trading platform with an easy to use interface and a wide variety of assets to trade.  As long as you have your own charting package for technical analysis, I saw no major issues with the overall functionality of their product.

Why does TechFinancials suck?

In my experience, the worst part of this trading product was the lack of technical analysis charts.  This limits my ability to conduct short term trades and platform charting packages are prevalent enough at this point that there is really no excuse for TechFinancials to not make this available.

Platform Technology

TechFinancials offers a sleek, clearly designed trading platform that allows positions to be opened in numerous different assets (currencies, commodities, stocks and indices), matching the average for most of the big binary options trading platforms. Expiry dates in these positions can be set to expire on an hourly, daily or weekly basis and recently they have added short term trading such as the popular 60 seconds, 2 minutes and 5 minutes.  The company platform itself is web based, and trades can be placed immediately after inputting your log in information (making the platform convenient for short term or news driven traders). 

With the three main trading options that are available, first is the High and Low option, which essentially means that the trade will be a “Call” or a “Put.”  With this option, traders will be using the current market price and determining whether or not prices will be higher or lower when the contract period expires.  The One Touch option is based on the chosen target price for your asset.  Returns for these trades will be determined by whether or not markets touch your price target before the end of the option period.  Boundary options use dual price targets to construct a range boundary and returns will depend on how market prices behave within that boundary during the contract period. 

The trading station can be altered using the drop down boxes for each market type (forex, stocks, indices, etc) and this allows traders to focus on specific assets that can be quickly pulled up for short term positions. Also, traders can group their most traded assets under the “Favorites” tab.

In the money returns can be clearly visualized under the Returns category, and from this table we can see that TechFinancials does offer some of the highest return levels in the binary options market.  Because of this, their out of the money returns tend to be lower.  To enter into a position, just click on your chosen asset, enter the amount to invest and then hit the Buy button.  The trading is very clear, straight forward and easy to understand.

One of the interesting features offered is the “Closable” setting. This allows a trader to close the position before the expiry date.  The payout return will be less than if you had let the trade expire, but this feature might be preferable when markets are moving in a surprising direction.  Prices, relative to other stock and forex providers are accurate and can be seen in real time.

One major drawback to the platform, however, is the lack of ability to use charts to do technical analysis.  With most of my trades based on support and resistance levels, I need this as an option before I enter trades.  But, using TechFinancials, this is not possible and I would need to find another charting package from another company to analyze the market before entering trades. 

My Trading Experience 

My trades with the platform included one hour Call options in both Gold and the S&P 500 index.  Since a large portion of my trading strategy relies on non-technical events (such as interest rate decisions or major news events), I particularly liked the feature that allowed me to close my open positions early.  This offers traders a great deal of flexibility that does not exist on many platforms and I thought at this was the most impressive feature of this binary options product.  I exercised the Closable trade feature on the Gold position as prices started to move against me (bearish direction) so, I found this feature to be especially valuable.  In my $100 S&P 500 position, prices did move in a favorable direction for my daily expiry time and I was able to take advantage of the higher payout rates that are offered by the broker, which are some of the highest that I have seen.

The trading platform I found to be easy to navigate, and it seems that a good deal of attention has been given to its design and usability.  The major problem that I had with the platform is the lack of charting tools that are directly available from the platform.  Even though I am largely a fundamentally based trader, I do use chart to determine precise entry and exit levels, so this for me was a huge deficiency in the platform.  Charts do become visible once trading assets are selected, but this takes extra time and this will likely be a problem for intraday traders. 

Overall, though, I did find the platform to be well designed and easy to use.  This platform will not be difficult to figure out for new traders (most features seem to be directed toward new traders).  The platform also allows trades to be closed early, which is a huge flexibility advantage.

Pros:

• TechFinancials offers excellent customer service
• 100% web-based and user-friendly
• Several methods for deposit
• The trade graph and the trade basics offered by TechFinancials is simply amazing
• TechFinancials allow early closure

Cons

• Previously they didn’t have enough expiry times but this seems to be fixed now. However, other platforms are more competitive in this aspect
• There are some problems with the trading manual as well as with the concept of depositing the money.
• Some of the brokers using TechFinancials platform are not opened to US markets.